I love lazy Sundays. And to me there can be little better use of this moseying time than to get into the kitchen and cook some damn good food.
A few weeks ago I was sauntering around Stockbridge Market (another great use of ‘Sunday time’) and packs of diced pheasant were on offer. Now, as it would simply have been rude to let that sort of an opportunity slip by, I bought myself a few packs for the freezer. Fast forward to the end of February (yup, I know it’s March, I’m just a little behind with my blogging) and a chilly wintery day. I knew my Sunday afternoon was going to be full of rugby - still not quite sure how that Scotland win happened, but I’m certainly not complaining - so I decided to make a hearty dish in the morning that could provide a good solid dinner.
This was a good excuse for a pie. I love pies - the sort I make, not the crappy ‘who ate all the pies’, football stadium kind - and the best part about them is just how easy they are to make. I made my pheasant stew filling in the morning and left it all sitting in the oven until the evening when I was ready for dinner.
As though that wasn’t simple enough already, I decided to cheat a little bit further and instead of getting a pie dish out and creating more washing up I made it a ‘deconstructed’ pie. Yup, that phrase that restaurants like to use to make their dishes sound fancier, but essentially means that they just cooked the pastry separately and charged you an extra fiver for the privilege. I also baked a couple of new potatoes along with it and went to my local wine shop and asked what they’d recommend to drink with it. I came home clutching a Brazilian red - yup, the double take was my first reaction too - which turned out to taste like a very fruity cordial that was far too drinkable - something that should be kept at arms length on a school night.
Deconstructed Pheasant Pie
This is an original The Usual Saucepans recipe. It was also a ‘made it up as I went along’ recipe, but thankfully it turned out alright. I made it using carrots and leeks, but that was because those were the vegetables available to me at the time; parsnips, turnip and other such ‘chunky’ veg would work well. It serves two.
Ingredients
250g Pheasant
2 small carrots
1 medium leek
1 glass of red wine
1 onion
1 clove of garlic
1 tbsp olive oil
500ml beef stock
1 small pack of (ready made) puff pastry
Directions
Chop the vegetables down to a fairly fine size. Make sure the meat is in (roughly) equal cubes and there’s not an excessive amount of fat on it. Sort out your casserole dish and put the oil in a pan. Preheat the oven to 180ºC.
In a sizzling hot pan, brown the chunks of meat, ensuring that they are sealed for the cooking process and then (using tongs) take them out and rest them on a plate at the side.
Next, put the onion chunks into the pan you browned the meat in - you shouldn’t need to add more oil, but do if you think it’ll stick - and soften them along with the garlic. Once these are beginning to soften (try not to colour them), throw in the carrots and leeks. When these are beginning to soften slightly transfer them into the casserole dish and mix in the meat. I then deglazed the pan with a generous glass of red wine (I leave the definition of generous up to your tastes) before adding it into the casserole with the stock.
Put the lid on the casserole dish and cook in the centre of the oven for two to two and a half hours, or until the meat is tender and the vegetables are cooked through. Turn the oven off and leave it sitting in there.
When you are closer to dinner time, turn the oven back on to 180ºC and cut your pastry into squares of about six or seven centimetres. Ensuring there is enough room for the pastry to rise, put the squares on a tray and into the oven. I did mine with halved new potatoes, just for something a little different. In the 20 or so minutes that the pastry needs, the casserole will warm back up.
Serve layered up ‘artistically’ on a plate, and if anyone remarks on the deconstructed parts, tell them it costs extra!
Edinburgh-dwelling, baking and food-obsessed, twenty-something adventure enthusiast. Runs on liberal amounts of coffee, cheese, cake and gin; bribable with same.
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