Savory pheasant bread pudding, page 75

Jen and son Cyrus at the farm

Yea. This recipe is not exactly easy to picture, is it? It’s like trying to wrap your mental taste buds around “kale chocolate chip cookies” or “fried catfish blueberry pie”.

Well, let me tell you, it may be a difficult recipe to picture, but OMG-and every other camouflaged expletive that gets the point across without saying naughty words on the internet- this baby is so bleeping good.

We were so proud of the pheasant that Fred hunted and ready to put it to good use. There had been a lot of effort to get the bird: Fred found a place that raised and released pheasants, he arranged with his sister to drive their dad up to Columbia to go hunting so that his dad didn’t have to make the trip, they spend about all day in the hunt, and about the rest of the day cleaning the birds. Now we were hoping to make something good from it.

Since there are two recipes for pheasant in the book and one calls for morels, a spring mushroom, we went with what was behind door number two: savory pheasant bread pudding.  It was one of those all day cooking affairs is seems like: first finish up cleaning the bird, then cook it until you can debone it, then get the rest of the ingredients for the recipe at the store, chop, stir, bla bla bla. And, all for a recipe that was so curious to us. What in the world were we making? Savory pheasant bread pudding? What even is that?

We were taking this dinner to our friends house who make cheese (www.goatsbeardfarm.com ) so that ingredient we left out until we got there. By the way, I can not recommend their cheese enough. It is fabulous and can be purchased in Columbia at the farmer’s market, HyVee and the Root Cellar, I believe. Anyway, we prepared the bread part of the recipe, and custard/meat/veggie part, and tromped on out to their farm to assemble and bake dinner.

It was all so wonderful. Grate some goat cheese and stir into the egg, cream mixture. Help package cheese while the oven warms up. Chat. Mix the spinach, pheasant, onion and cream mixture with roasted bread chunks in pans and bake. In the mean time make a salad of candied Missouri pecans, dead ripe pear, Goatsbeard Farm blue cheese, currants and lettuce. Serve with beer. Chat at dinner about the hunt, and about what in the world we were eating and about everything else we are anxious to chat about. Watch the kids play. Be glad for the lives we have.

This one one of the best recipes out of the book thus far. And, the whole experience from hunt to dinner was an experience just like we hoped for when we started the woods to food project--an interesting hunt shared with family, a great meal shared with friends.

Man, sometimes life is rich.