Pheasant Pot Pies

C

crockett

New member
I've been having a good season so far, putting in a lot of time and putting on a lot of miles. We've trained hard, hunted hard, and generally had pretty good success. Pearl is starting to get a little ragged, including a pretty good barbed-wire gouge on one leg that needs a bit of time to heal. Not that much need for a deer this year, so given the weather today I opted to spend a little time in my Trophy Room... Yep, the kitchen!

I decided to make pheasant pot pies.

Four roosters (minus one breast from a too-close shot). Quartered, rinsed and drained.


I cut up the breasts, then cut the meat off the thighs and cut that up too.


If you've ever considered not keeping the legs of pheasants, check out how much meat came off just the thighs!


The lower legs are hard to debone because of all the little hard tendons, so I prefer to brown those in some butter, then simmer them covered with some broth until they're tender and easier to debone.


Bit of work to get good meat off the lower legs, but I got a good double-handful.
 
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Watch out for these too!


Simmer all this raw meat for a half hour in chicken broth and water mix, tossing in the precooked lower leg meat partway through.


Add sliced carrots, peas and chopped celery and simmer another 15 minutes.


Drain and reserve the broth, and put the meat and veg mixture into the pot pie pans, with or without a bottom pie crust depending what you like. And yeah, I cheated with the pie crusts - I can't seem to make them better than the pros, so I just buy them ready to go!


Fry onions in plenty of butter. Mix in flour, celery seed, salt, pepper, add milk and the reserved broth until you have a nice thick sauce.

Spoon the sauce over the meat and veg
 
Pinch on the top pie crusts, cover, label, and freeze or cook (this load was for the freezer - two of them are destined to be handed out to landowners! A much nicer gift of appreciation than a bloodied rooster with I the feathers still on!). Brush the trimmed pie crust from the smaller pie with sugar, cinnamon and butter and bake as a little snack. Nutritious and delicious! ;-)


Fry up any bruised or bloodied tidbits and give them to your good buddy, who tore chunks out of her nose to put those roosters in the air for you, and scratched her belly all to hell retrieving them out of the brambles!


Label and freeze any leftover broth for future projects - doesn't get better than that stuff!


Aaaaaaand then make moose Philly cheesesteak sandwiches with home made oven-fries for supper!


Lucky it doesn't rain this hard EVERY Saturday - I'd be fat as a house! LOL

-Dave
 
There was a thread on here telling us how to remove the tendons from the lower leg. you might want to look it up.:)
 
Thanks Jmac - I'll check for it. I do the part of snapping the feet and standing on them and pulling the tendons out, but I still find that there are many muscle segments that are attached to things that are like very sharp hard little 'toothpicks' for lack of a better description. I've not found a way to get those out of raw lower legs.
Dave
 
Good stuff. I think I'm getting hungry. lol

Thanks for sharing.

Nick
 
Looks great! I think I'll make up a couple myself.:thumbsup:
 
Here is pics of some of my recent pies & pasties. I am gonna take a video making these this week & I'll post it up!!!



 
Let me give you my address so you can ship some! :p
 
Let me just say thank you Crockett. I'm not sure why making a pot pie never crossed my mind but I must say this is one of, if not the best pheasant dinner I've ever made.

 
I'm making these this weekend! 5" disposable pie tins with lids will be here Friday and I have 10 pheasants in the freezer.
 
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