Pheasant Casserole

Stephen spent the day touring London with his visiting mother on Saturday but, with food never very far from his mind, he conveniently scheduled a trip to Borough Market for the way home. We had briefly discussed what to eat but hadn’t made any firm plans so rifling through the bags when he returned home was a little like being on Ready, Steady, Cook (one of my teenage dreams: I applied many times but never made it).

Although I’m sure Ainsley never had this problem, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the contents at first but the mysterious looking ingredients turned out to be pheasants and red kale, along with potatoes, celeriac, swede, onions and bacon. Pheasant casserole with celeriac and potato mash and red kale then? Yep.

We followed a fairly standard casserole recipe that doesn’t really need repeating (although you can look here if you want to see how we usually do things) and then left the dish to cook until we couldn’t wait any longer. It could have done with a little more cooking though really, the meat was obviously cooked through (I really didn’t want to poison my future mother-in-law) but the vegetables were only just tender and the flavours hadn’t really deepened as much as they could have.

Despite those minor quibbles, this is probably the most success we’ve had with game birds recently; the meat on the bone stayed very tender and the breasts were just a little dry, an altogether better effort than this anyway.