Oh… this is why we hunt!

After an absolutely wonderful day with our new friends pheasant hunting, it was time to start deciding how we were going to cook our birds. As a child, I was fortunate enough to have wild game as a way of life on our family dining table - it was normal to come home to venison, duck, goose or pheasant for dinner depending on the current hunting season. The Huntsman however, has never had pheasant — this was going to be a fun challenge! Growing up, my Mom would prepare and make pheasant, she would use lemon, rosemary and other spices to enhance the flavor and would serve it with wild rice. While this was a great memory and meal, I wanted to give the Huntsman a more fancy experience with his first bird. I started to look for recipes and found many that would be more than yummy - however, there wasn’t one that really fit with what I had in mind — this meant that I would take a basic recipe and use it as inspiration for my own!

I am a Pinterest junky and this is where I found the inspiration for our meal.  A large cast iron dutch oven was going to be how I was going to cook our meal. We were going to make bacon and gruyere stuffed pheasant with a white wine cream sauce served with garlic and rosemary mashed potatoes and roasted fall vegetables. Cooking is a favorite thing of ours and we both compliment each other with different culinary skills. It’s a great way to unwind, talk about our day and reminisce about our hunts as we prepare dinner together.

First, we had to clean and rinse our birds, then we used the pheasant breasts for our main meal. (The other parts of the pheasant were also utilized however, they were not the star of this dish!) We pounded out the pheasant breasts then placed a slice of gruyere and slice of crispy bacon in the center of the flattened meat.

We rolled it up and secured it with wooded toothpicks. As the Huntsman did this, I prepared the onions and mushrooms browning them and softening them up. I removed them from the cast iron and set them aside; then I took each stuffed pheasant breast and browned them on each side, seasoning them with a touch of salt and pepper. I then removed the meat and set it aside.
To the hot cast iron, I added some white wine to deglaze the dutch oven; next came the addition of the heavy cream, chicken broth and reintroduced the onions and mushrooms.
Once this lovely fragrant sauce reached a boil, I turned the heat way down (cast iron retains heat) and added back my stuffed pheasant breasts.  I added a little thyme to the top and let the flavors mix and marinate cooking the birds on low for an hour and a half in the cast iron dutch oven.

I then prepared the mixture of vegetables for roasting and began to boil the potatoes. We used Yukon gold potatoes for our mashed potatoes, added butter, garlic, rosemary, a little cream, salt and pepper. As for the roasted vegetables, we cubed sweet potatoes, butternut squash and halved Brussel sprouts; drizzled olive oil over them, seasoned with salt and pepper and roasted them for 45 minutes in our oven adding dried cranberries and walnuts in the last five minutes. Oh - the smell of our home as we cooked!! It was unbelievable!

Finally it was time to actually taste and indulge in our masterpiece! We fixed our plates and sat down to enjoy our dinner. The pheasant was seasoned perfectly and was tender and juicy, the smokey flavor of the gruyere was complimented by the bacon without overpowering the meal. The mashed potatoes were heavenly and perfectly creamy! The vegetables were divine with the perfect amount of salt and pepper enhanced by the earthy taste of the olive oil. This is a meal we would definitely prepare and make again! And this is why we hunt; we prepared a gourmet meal that easily could rival anything you would pay for at an upscale restaurant at home, using simple ingredients, meat harvested by us all while spending quality time together.