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I finally got time to attempt making some foraged pheasant & wild garlic kievs! The bird was a beautiful, pristine and very fresh male pheasant, I picked him up from long grass beside a tiny coastal back road in North Yorkshire at the weekend… couldn’t see any injuries, he was floppy and still warm, looked about as perfect as roadkill foraging comes. I made a herb butter using 5 different wild garlics: ramsons (wild garlic), crow garlic (wild onion), three-cornered leek, few-flowered leek & jack-by-the-hedge (garlic-mustard) plus it also had common sorrel and a little sweet cicely in. I used softened unsalted butter and added sea salt flakes myself to taste. The initial prep of the bird took ages… the main reason being instead of just breasting him (place bird on back, stand on the wings and pull the legs to easily separate the guts and abdomen away from the ribcage in one easy movement) I decided to carefully pluck the whole body to try and keep the skin on the breasts to help wrap the kiev in… the idea being I knew the skin would shrink on frying so I hoped it would work to seal and hold the kievs together, but in reality it shrank and pulled the seam wide apart instead lol! D’oh. Hence emergency patch-up string surgery required before the oven bake stage hehe…!! So it might have looked a bit, erm, *rustic* haha they tasted bloomin’ delicious! The mash was 1 sweet potato and 3 smaller white spuds, maybe just over half white, for the starch, and I also put some more of the wild garlic butter through it at the end. It was great fun but next time it’ll be much quicker as I’ll not bother plucking as no need to keep the skin and just pull the breasts out much more quickly. Prep time will be much reduced therefore in future 🙂 I might have spent more time on the presentation incorporating more foraged accompaniments etc as I had plenty around to use, including some St George’s mushrooms and miner’s lettuce but we were so hungry by that point it just kept it simple haha…! Anyway, I am really pleased with the flavour and can’t wait to try it again and perfect my technique so that emergency string trussing isn’t necessary next time 😉
#foraging #wildfood #wildmeat #roadkill #pheasant #game #accidentalmeat #homemade #kievs #wildgarlic #rookieerror #experimenting
