A step by step guide to cooking a pheasant: Part II

The next phase in pheasant cooking is to make the rich plum sauce. A little known fact is: not only are the French renown for fortitude and resilience in the face of hostile invasions AND national self effacing modesty, they are also not shabby in the kitchen. This rich plum sauce is based loosely on a French recipe.

Step one is to chop the ingredients needed for the sauce and put some of them in a saucepan.

We picked up this nifty little chopper in a Tupperware party Megan attended last year and it works well slicing onions with no tears in a dishwasher safe configuration.

Heat the sauce pan and selected ingredients with some butter until the plants are golden and the butter is clear. You shouldn’t rush this step as getting the start of the sauce right will provide a stable base for the richer flavors to come.

The next step is to take the plums out of the can and remove the stones, this is an icky job and plum juice stains badly, so be careful. Whatever you do, don’t add the plums or retained juice to the plant/butter mixture, there are other vegetables to chop yet.

Once the vegetables are chopped, stick them in the oven; for this meal we did kumara slices to roast in the pheasant tray and potatoes done in a secret recipe, which can’t be discussed.

You will need to adjust the temperature of the oven with the vegetables and as a general rule for a good roast start low and increase during the course of the cook. By this time you should have already put the plums and juice in the sauce or the butter will be burnt and you’ll have to start again.

When the pheasant has cooked through remove it from the oven and let is sit for ten minutes to make sure it is fully relaxed. You can then take the other things out of the oven, and combine with whatever else you cooked. I heated some frozen peas.

The pheasant should now be ready, yours will probably have been better if you had basted it with the plum sauce about half an hour before it came out of the oven – like the following one was.

It is important to remember pheasants are much easier to cook than carve.

Your end result should look something like this…

Bon appetit!