Bob called me the Saturday before Christmas as he was heading back from a hunting trip in Eastern Washington. He had some game birds, would I like them?
Absolutely! Who can turn down a bag of freshly butchered game birds? Bob gave me a breast of a "greater Canada geese," a "lesser Canada geese" and a "wood duck." Here is a picture of the bag of the meat, with Pearl hoping for a Christmas miracle of falling bags.
Next step for Christmas dinner, figuring out what to do with these pieces of meat. A quick shout out on facebook and I found a British recipe for "hot game pie" that called for pheasants and measures in metric, but it gave me the basics (and I have the internet).
This morning started with sleeping in, then catching up with an episode of the BBC series Survivors, and then finally pulling myself out of bed to start the stock. Instead of pheasant I bought some Cornish Game Hens that I chopped up and sauteed and then simmered them into stock. After I assembled all the meats with the stock, I had to make something called a celeraic puree. Celeraic, I learned, is British for Celery Root. It looks like this:
Then I made up my own pastry recipe, using roughly 8 cups of flour to a pound of butter and some salt, with cup of cold water thrown in at the end. I needed to have enough pastry to cover a 9 X 11 lasagne pan that I was going to fill with all my meat stuffing.
Finally, I had to figure out how to convert Stone temperature guidelines in the British recipe, and once I did that, I went to turn on the oven to about 400 degrees. And nothing happened.
Oh the little temperature guage read 100 degrees, but that was more aspirational than factual.
After close to an hour of trying different ways to turn the oven on (if I ask it to pre-heat, will it light? How about if I set it REALLY hot, will that convince it to go on?) I had to admit that the little piece of gizmo that usually turned on my oven had gone back east to visit relatives for Christmas. Time to get creative.
Time to call Bobbi.
At 5:00, with a gumpy "I'm tired of everything being so hard" and a few tears, I announced my arrival and shoved the assembled Fowl Pie in her oven. 40 minutes later, with some rolls cooked and the dog getting plenty of action, we were ready to go. I put the Fowl Pie back into the car and drove to pick up the boy. Thirty minutes after that we were home and the Fowl Pie was on the table, the presents were being ripped open, and all was right in the world. Except if you were a wood duck
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