After I found enough chestnut boletes to actually cook, I planned out a couple dishes they would go in with what I had in the fridge. The first thing was half food/half humor: cooking them with a few other very small things as a sort of play on tiny animals in a tiny land, like…
Poultry
White Pheasant Stew with Chanterelles and Black Trumpets
After Anthony Bourdain passed away I spent the following week tearing through his first book and then his cookbook, a sort of half mourning, half refresher course on one my favorite chefs I’ve always looked up to. The days after his passsing were announced for me were sullen, as they were for a lot of…
Pan Roasted Chicken Breast with Duxelles Sauce
You had a great mushroom hunting season, you crushed the chanterelles, boletes, and all the mushrooms you wanted to get. You made duxelles, and put some in the freezer for a rainy day in the off-season. Great, but now what do you do with the duxelles? Duxelles in stuffings and such is great, but one…
Pan Roasted Chicken with Morel Sauce
I never went to culinary school, and neither did the most important people who trained me, or the people that trained them. Instead of going to culinary school (which I’m not saying is a bad idea) I read, and worked, a lot. The foundation of my library have always been books on classical French and…
Quail With Cranberries, Rowanberries, and Chestnut Sauce
Using pickles is a hallmark of mine, I love the brightness they add to a dish. Pickled berries aren’t really something you think about often, since most of the time they get made into jams and jellies. Typical jams and jellies use way too much sugar for my tastes though, and can overpower a sauce,…
Pheasant Mousseline with Morel Mushrooms, Nettles, Asparagus and Green Garlic
This Spring I was rummaging around the freezer and found a couple pheasant breasts, the sad kind I usually get donated by friends who hunt and just breast the birds out and throw away the legs and skin. It’s too bad more people don’t save all of the animal they kill, but I’m happy to…
Quail with Black Trumpet Jus and Parsley Root Puree
Meal in a box dinners tout all kinds of fun origins and catch-phrases: “Chef inspired!” “Easy to make!” “Seasonal!” “Perfectly Portioned!”. A few years ago I got approached by a local food service that delivers chef-inspired menus to home cooks. I thought I’d give it a shot, even though it felt a little weird and…
Winter Greens With Lentils, Chicken Heart Confit and Hedgehog Mushrooms
As the head of purchasing for the restaurant I have plenty of local purveyors I buy food from but there’s one that stands out from the others. He isn’t technically local, but he might as well be. His name is George Weppler, and in the Twin Cities there’s plenty of restaurants that would like to…
Baby Bok Choy In Lactarius Broth With Quail Eggs
Here’s a recipe I created to use dried Lactarius salmoneus, donated to the Cascade Mycological Society for their cookbook. When powdered and made into a broth, you’d be hard pressed to say it isn’t chicken stock. From my experience, different dried Lactarius resembling deliciosus, rubrilactus, and sanguifluus will give similar results. The recipe is designed…
Sharptail Grouse With Prosciutto and Elderberry Vinegar Sauce
Seems like each year innevitably a friend of a friend of a friend contacts me wondering if I want pheasants to cook with since they filled their limit.. After they bring by some birds I process them and bring them to my home, since it’s not exactly legal to sell game you’ve shot where I…
How To Cook a Peacock
Bucket list foods, everyone has them. There’s a number of them still on mine, but a little while ago I got to scratch peacock off the list. My girlfriends mother build a farm community in Wisconsin in the 70’s and is still very much plugged in to the local scene. She knows who grows which…
Peacock Thigh Confit, With Chanterelles and Leeks
As I was dreaming up how to make a 4 year old peacock taste good, I knew right away some of it would be made into confit. There’s a transformation that happens with meat with bones in it or ribbons of fat after it’s been seasoned and poached slowly in lard at a low temperature…
Peacock Neck Sausage
American culture has a predilection for looking at exotic food from safe distances. We want to watch shows about eating bugs and snakes, but the majority of us would balk if someone tried to feed them to us. We’re fascinated by foods we deem strange, but that fascination is strictly for the value of the…