Pheasant

In 1981, when I met my husband-to-be, I liked him immediately. Like grew into love, and within 3 months we eloped and moved in together.

Now that’s not something I would recommend to people, like getting married at 16, but it has worked for us. However, there are things that you can’t learn about a person in 3 months.

It was well after we married that I learned my husband was a hunter. I nearly fainted. It was too late for an annulment, but trust me, I wasn’t happy.

During my last years of high school, I lived in Park City, Utah, which is a big deer and elk hunting area. I worked at a diner back then, so every year I had to put up with these drunk guys stopping in for meals, making feeble attempts at sobering up, while being crudely obnoxious to me.

These guys would fly into Utah for long weekends of gun- and man-bonding, shooting anything and everything that moved. I remember seeing dead horses and cows that were killed by these idiots during their drunken hunting fests. Sometimes if they kept the deer or elk, they would leave the entrails behind to rot. So believe me. I wasn’t keen on hunters.

My husband told me that first of all, he only killed birds, no four-legged animals. That made me feel better, although I’m not sure why. And he also explained to me that he was trained at an early age on the sport of hunting, and on gun handling.

But it was still really hard to believe that when he’d go out with his buddies for their annual pheasant and quail shoot over the years, that there wasn’t drinking involved. But this was serious business, he claimed, and at least during the time they were hunting, there was no drinking. At nighttime, it sounded like after walking 10 or 20 miles, they were just happy to sleep.

It’s a touchy subject, this hunting thing, which is why I’m not offering up this post as a debate forum. I’ve loosened up about hunting over the past years, and of course I’m especially understanding of people who hunt because they must. That makes complete sense to me.

Out of respect, my husband keeps his shotgun out of my sight, and he’s never asked me to join him. He also doesn’t go on hunts where all the birds are sent flying towards you, which really is no sport at all.

I will never touch a gun and I will never shoot an animal. That I know. I (sort of) understand that it’s a sport, and if there’s no waste, that’s a good thing. But here’s the thing. I fish. In fact, I love to fish. And I do eat the fish. And I also step on spiders. Happily. So what’s the difference?

So most every bird season since we’ve been married, depending on where we were living, my husband went hunting, and on good days he would bring home pheasants and quail. Quail are so small that I always poached them and fed the meat to our dogs. I really didn’t know what else to do with them. Pheasants, of course, are bigger. But the first time you bite down on a metal buck shot, you become a bit timid about eating more pheasant. So pheasant meat also became dog food, which the dogs loved.

Sadly, I never really viewed pheasant as “gourmet” game that I was lucky to have in my freezer. Occasionally I would make lentil pheasant soup, which was outstanding, but again, when you bite down on that buck shot, your ears ring and if you’re really unlucky, your tooth cracks. (Sorry, honey.)

This year, I decided it was time to actually work on preparing pheasant, including de-boning the pheasants. My first recipe pheasant with green chiles. Then I decided the sous vide process would be the best way to cook tender pheasant.