Pheasant breasts and PSB

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My recently-harvested PSB was served yesterday as an accompaniment to a meal based on a pack of Pheasant breasts bought from the Farmers’ Market.

Pheasant is really nice meat – a bit like a rather richer version of chicken, but not “gamey”. Since it comes from a wild bird, it can be a bit dry, simply because it is not very fatty, so it benefits from being cooked in a sauce.

I made a sauce from shallots, mushrooms and cream (Elmlea actually), with a splash of Dry Sherry to liven it up. Here are some of my ingredients, during preparation:

The orange-coloured stuff is Blue Shropshire cheese, which I put in a sauce for the Broccoli.

To give it a full description, this is what the meal consisted of:
Pheasant breasts in mushroom cream sauce
Purple Sprouting Broccoli with Blue Shropshire cheese sauce
Baby new potatoes
I served it with a bottle of  Rosé wine – one of the few remaining from our membership of the now-defunct Wineshare wine club.

Here are the Pheasant breasts cooking in the shallot and mushroom sauce…

Yes, that is a lot of meat. The pack had 6 breasts in it, but we only managed to eat 2 each.

This is the Shropshire Blue cheese sauce for the Broccoli… I used the roux method: melt some butter; add some flour; cook for a minute; add milk in small quantities, stirring constantly until smooth; add the cheese and stir again. Add more milk if required to achieve the right (thick and glossy) consistency.

And the Broccoli covered in the sauce… Fresh PSB like this only needs literally a minute or two of cooking. (BTW: this sauce was absolutely wonderful!)

Here it is, all plated-up:

For me, the star of the show was the PSB (of course). Covered as it was in thick, creamy cheese sauce it would be hard to beat!

[Note: boiled / steamed PSB goes cold very quickly. My idea of covering it in cheese sauce was really a way of counteracting this, and it worked really well. I strongly recommend it.]

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