cellini's Diaryland Diary

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A Day of Laboring Followed by a Cooked Pheasant

I am horribly sore and tired but I got a lot done yesterday. Someone kindly pointed out to me on Sunday evening that chicken wire comes in 24" high bales as well as the full-length bales that I am used to dealing with. Meaning that I can get the shorter bales into the trunk of my car. Perfect.

Since I had Presidents Day (yesterday) off from work I went over to Tractor Supply in the morning to buy 150 feet of chicken wire. I also got a salt/mineral lick while I was there since they were only .

I put the lick out on the far side of the lower meadow for the deer to enjoy. On my way out there I noticed that there were a lot of unbroken clays laying about in the grass from all of the skeet that's been going on lately. Those are ones that we missed, of course. So I wandered around in the muck and tall grass for a while and picked up about 40 or 50 of them that we can reuse. Then I set to work on the fence.

Ow. What I was doing was attaching this chicken wire to the bottom of the fence over the cattle-type wire that is already there, which Alice can squeeze through. It takes a toll on your hands after a while. I was kneeling in the mud, rolling out this wire with all sorts of little pokey wire points and fishing cable ties through the holes and back. My back hurts, my fingers are sore and covered with little scratches. At least the weather was mostly really nice, aside from everything being all mushy from rain the night before.

I ran out of wire 20 feet short. So I'll pick up a little 25 foot roll after work to finish up later this week. Just before dark, Paul (the blacksmith) dropped by with an extra pheasant he'd bagged that afternoon. I gave him a couple venison steaks from the freezer.

I'd never eaten pheasant before but always been curious. There are these descriptions of eating roasted pheasant in one of the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian that have long had me very keen to try it. I did a terrible job of cleaning and gutting the thing on account of never having dressed out a pheasant before and also because my hands were in a terrible state from working on the fence all day long. Not that there was anything really wrong with my results. It just wasn't pretty since I didn't know how to deal properly with the wings and other little details like that. I gave up on trying to pluck it and just skinned the thing instead, which I have found is much faster and easier when dealing with doves at any rate. The only trouble with skinning rather than plucking a fowl is that you will likely lose some of the flavor and the fat in the process. Special attention must then be paid in cooking the bird so that it does not dry out.

The pheasant was good. Not amazing but good. I threw together a sort of glaze or marinade by combining half a jar of blueberry preserves with a good measure of olive oil and and a bit of black pepper and basil. At least I think it was basil. Something like that. Anyway, I smothered the bird inside and out with the mixture and stuck it in the oven in a covered dish. I was just too exhausted to do anything more creative or involved. We ate it with boiled new potatoes and baby carrots. At risk of a cliche, it tasted like chicken. Not exactly like chicken but quite close. The thing still merits more experimentation in my opinion. I'd like to get a few more somewhere and trying plucking them and cooking them with the skin on. Also look for some other recipes.

I have no place where I can hunt pheasant, unfortunately. I'll have to do some more research and find out if there is a wildlife management area somewhere in the state where I could make a trip to next fall in order to get some. I do have a perfect pheasant gun, that being my 20 gauge side-by-side Stevens.

Most food tastes so much better after one has read a particularly vivid and flattering description of it's consumption. I went through a phase in high school where I read all of Anne Rice's vampire chronicles. There's a bit in 'The Vampire Lestat' where Lestat eats his final meal before becoming a vampire. It was a thick beef stew served with "a very cold white wine." Ever since reading that, I find the combination irresistible.

Ironically, Jack London's description of the first beer that he tasted makes me drool at the very recollection of the passage in 'Joahn Barleycorn.' I say ironically, because London himself had hated the stuff at the time. In fact, I must now quote the passage in full:

"I was five years old the first time I got drunk. It was on a hot day, and my father was ploughing in the field. I was sent from the house, half a mile away, to carry to him a pail of beer. "And be sure you don't spill it," was the parting injunction.

"It was, as I remember it, a lard pail, very wide across the top, and without a cover. As I toddled along, the beer slopped over the rim upon my legs. And as I toddled, I pondered. Beer was a very precious thing. Come to think of it, it must be wonderfully good. Else why was I never permitted to drink of it in the house? Other things kept from me by the grown-ups I had found good. Then this, too, was good. Trust the grown-ups. They knew. And, anyway, the pail was too full. I was slopping it against my legs and spilling it on the ground. Why waste it? And no one would know whether I had drunk or spilled it.

"I was so small that, in order to negotiate the pail, I sat down and gathered it into my lap. First I sipped the foam. I was disappointed. The preciousness evaded me. Evidently it did not reside in the foam. Besides, the taste was not good. Then I remembered seeing the grown-ups blow the foam away before they drank. I buried my face in the foam and lapped the solid liquid beneath. It wasn't good at all. But still I drank. The grown- ups knew what they were about. Considering my diminutiveness, the size of the pail in my lap, and my drinking out of it my breath held and my face buried to the ears in foam, it was rather difficult to estimate how much I drank. Also, I was gulping it down like medicine, in nauseous haste to get the ordeal over.

"I shuddered when I started on, and decided that the good taste would come afterward. I tried several times more in the course of that long half-mile. Then, astounded by the quantity of beer that was lacking, and remembering having seen stale beer made to foam afresh, I took a stick and stirred what was left till it foamed to the brim.

"And my father never noticed. He emptied the pail with the wide thirst of the sweating ploughman, returned it to me, and started up the plough. I endeavoured to walk beside the horses. I remember tottering and falling against their heels in front of the shining share, and that my father hauled back on the lines so violently that the horses nearly sat down on me. He told me afterward that it was by only a matter of inches that I escaped disembowelling. Vaguely, too, I remember, my father carried me in his arms to the trees on the edge of the field, while all the world reeled and swung about me, and I was aware of deadly nausea mingled with an appalling conviction of sin.

"I slept the afternoon away under the trees, and when my father roused me at sundown it was a very sick little boy that got up and dragged wearily homeward."

Despite the fact that little Jack London hated the whole experience, this idea of drinking a pail of cold, bitter, frothy beer in the middle of a field on a very hot day is one that I find intensely appealing. I can damn near smell it even as I write this.

Hemingway was good with food. Writing about it, I mean. I've not read loads of Hemingway, but enough to get the idea. The boiled eggs and cold chicken in 'The Sun Also Rises' have stuck with me over a decade since I read the book and forgot practically everything else about it. There's something that I'm due to read again.

Anything tastes much, much better after one has eaten it while truly ravenous. There's no other way to account for my strange fondness for refried black beans scooped up with a piece of pita bread, perhaps with a hunk of stale-ish cheddar cheese melting into the stuff. I ate this once at the end of a particularly trying day in Outward Bound when we were low on rations and there wasn't much else to work with.

11:09 - 2008-02-19

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