Tomato Soup (Gluten Free)

Tomato Soup from South Carolina is a nod to the realities, viz., as they say in the UK, that the all shellfish dinner party is not what dietitians might call a balanced meal. Also, hell, it's the middle of summer and tomatoes are ripe. So go for it.
However, I would not unreservedly recommend this soup. It's bland as beige cardboard. I salted and peppered the bejesus out of it and finally doctored it with cayenne pepper and Worcestershire sauce in order to make it taste like anything. Maybe it was the tomatoes. I bought them at Magruders, which used to be a local grocery chain. This summer the other stores were closed, but the DC store stayed open, thankfully. The tomatoes were reported to come from nearby Montgomery County, Md. and probably did, but they didn't taste like much.
Instead of finely chopping, as the directions order the cook to do, I ran the peeled tomatoes through the food processor. Peeled tomatoes are slippery and messy. You want soup, make soup, which the food processor is admirably designed to do. One peels the tomatoes by dumping them in boiling water for two minutes or so. The peels come right off. I don't know why the recipe calls for baking soda. It makes everything fizz like crazy for a minute or so.
I made the recipe gluten free by using the gluten free bread crumbs. I was going to mash up water biscuits to make the crumbs and forget about gluten free, but Bob said put in the bread crumbs. It seemed to work fine. As far as amounts go, I probably threw in half a cup.
The soup seemed to be moderately well received. The guests did not go into transports over it, but they ate it. If you have a particularly flavorful source of tomatoes, tell us about them, and your experiences with this recipe.

Tomato Soup

4 cups finely chopped, peeled tomatoes
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups light cream or milk
2 large soda crackers, made into fine crumbs
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup finely grated Cheddar cheese

1. Cook the tomatoes for about fifteen minutes, stirring to prevent sticking. Add the baking soda and stir until it stops effervescing. 
2. stir in the cream or milk and the cracker crumbs. Reheat. Season with salt and pepper. Whirl in the butter.
3. Serve in hot bowls and sprinkle one tablespoon of the cheese over each serving. Makes four servings.

Broiled Stuffed Lobster (Gluten Free)

I got back from my hiking vacation in North Carolina a week ago and was appalled to see that I had only racked up three blog posts in July. Summer is normally a busy month. This summer is different from other summers because I am not staying in Massachusetts. My friend Lucie had the temerity to move back into her own apartment, leaving me no place to go. Bob and I were supposed to go to Stockbridge at the end of August to visit my cousin Marie Noel. However, fate intervened in the shape of a Pembroke Welsh Corgi puppy whose name, when he gets here, will be Watson.
I may not have reported that Haddock, our dear old corgi, died last October, just before Hurricane Sandy. We wanted another corgi, but I had not been looking for one when our neighbor, Debra, gave us the name of a woman who might have corgi puppies. I started e-mailing her back in February. Well, lo and behold, my desultory e-mails led, last Saturday, to the offer of a male corgi puppy, aged 10 weeks. So, we're not going north, and any shellfish I cook has to be accompanied by a dinner party.
Saturday, I invited our very old friends, David and Marilyn, and my brother George, over for dinner. We lived with Marilyn and her then-boyfriend, another Bob, in 1971 in the basement of the runaway house on 18th Street in what is now a high flying neighborhood. In those days, it was run down and occasionally scary. I refused to park my VW bug on S Street because a woman had approached my Bob there and asked him to pee into a bottle so she could pass her drug test. Thankfully Marilyn dropped the other Bob along the way  and married David.
I had three lobster eaters, David, George and me, and two non lobster eaters, Bob and Marilyn. This lobster, as mentioned in the title, is stuffed. You take the guts out between the legs and fill that with oyster stuffing. I love oyster stuffing. One year, when I was working at a small newspaper on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, we had oyster stuffing in our Thanksgiving turkey. Shortly thereafter, Bob developed an allergy to shellfish. The oysters provide little nuggets of salty flavor among the bread, onions and celery. I made the stuffing gluten-free with gluten free breadcrumbs, available from Giant in the DC area.
I got started cooking late. Usually Bob pokes me along,  but this time, I guess he figured I was 62 years old and could jolly well tell time myself. When David and Marilyn arrived, we were still in our shorts and t-shirts and I had just fired up the charcoal.
This lobster is to be broiled over charcoal. I actually ended up putting it under the broiler because it did not appear to be fully cooked after 20 minutes on the grill.  The stuffing was a little charred and the meat dried out. If you want to finish your lobster under the broiler, five minutes is plenty. Also, try to find your lobster cracking device before you put the lobsters on the table. I was pounding away at the claws with a meat hammer, but they didn't crack. 
The lobsters did their usual dancy-prancy thing, waving and flailing with a knife stuck in their backs. I was running in and out of the house onto the terrace to turn over the meat, plop the lobsters on the grill and check on their degree of doneness. It made following the conversation sort of hard. Marilyn had gotten back from North Dakota at 2 am on Saturday morning, but I missed the fact that she had only been there for two days. North Dakota cuisine had given her a distaste for fried food. I ended up skipping the dessert, a concoction called Farmer in the Dell, in which Wonder Bread is rolled out flat, spread with farmer cheese, rolled into a cylinder and fried in butter. We donated the Wonder Bread to the church breakfast program for the homeless on Sunday. Bob didn't want to risk having it in the house in case I might make a midweek dessert. I protested that feeding Wonder Bread to homeless people was condescending and wrong, but he insisted they liked it.
This argument reminded me of a series of non-pc jokes my sister and my mother had going in the 1980s when my sister decided to become a caterer in which a series of people of different ethnicities perported to like various non food items in their food. But Bob is a pretty socially conscious guy. He used to get up at 5:00 am once a week for over a year to work at the breakfast program when he was on the church vestry, so I figured he was telling the truth.
Reporting on the lobster. My brother liked it better than boiled lobster because the meat didn't come bathed in water. David apologized because he didn't eat it all. I found it dry. If the meat still looks pink after the required time on the grill, make sure you only put it under the grill for five minutes or less. Also, don't yank up the marjoram when you are harvesting herbs in your garden. Trying to stuff the severed plant back into the dirt doesn't quite work.

Broiled Stuffed Lobster

Oyster stuffing:
1/4 cup butter
1/2  cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped celery
4 mushrooms, chopped
1 pint oysters with liquor
4 pints dry bread crumbs
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1/4 teaspoon marjoram
Lobsters: 4 one-pound to one and one-half pound lobsters
Melted butter
Lemon wedges

1. To prepare stuffing, melt the butter in a skillet and saute the onions and celery in it until tender. Add the mushrooms and cook two minutes longer.
2. Drain the oysters, reserving liquor. Chop the oysters and add to the mushroom mixture.
3. Add the bread crumbs, parsley, salt, pepper, thyme, marjoram and enough of the reserved oyster liquor to moisten.
4. Split the lobsters lengthwise and remove the dark vein down the center and the "sac" behind the eyes. Crack the claws.
5.Place the lobsters shell side up over hot coals on a barbecue grill or shell side down under a preheated broiler and broil five minutes.
6. Fill the body cavity with the oyster stuffing and wrap in heavy-duty aluminum foil to grill shell side down on charcoal grill or shell side up under a broiler. Broil about fifteen minutes. Serve with melted butter and lemon wedges.

Tomato Marmalade

Plum tomatoes are ripe at the pick your own places in Maryland and Virginia, and no doubt, points South as well. It's time to make tomato marmalade. If you are new to this blog, your reaction is probably something like "Tomato marmalade? That sounds completely disgusting!" Well, slow down. It occurred to me that I have become something of a marmalade expert. I have made, over the three years of writing this blog, at least six different kinds of marmalade, including carrot and cucumber.
Here's my theory. Remember how children used to receive an orange in their Christmas stocking? Oranges were rare and expensive back in the 1940s and earlier. But tomatoes, carrots and cucumbers? They were as plentiful as grass. So inventive cooks bought one or two oranges for flavoring, cut up mounds of the cheap vegetable ingredient, poured in sugar and boiled. Voila! Marmalade. Cucumber marmalade does not taste of cucumbers. It tastes of lemons. No more does carrot marmalade taste of carrots. It tastes of oranges.
Tomato marmalade is more of the same. I noticed a huge pile of plum tomatoes at Homestead Farm in Poolesville, where I stopped off after my riding lesson. I quickly called Bob and asked him to  find out how many pounds of plum tomatoes I would need. We determined that we did not want or need 24 six ounce jars of tomato marmalade, so I cut the recipe in half. I bought four pounds of plum tomatoes, and a bunch of other stuff as well, including fresh corn.
I commenced the marmalade manufacture after lunch. I had to go to Safeway to buy more sugar, as the recipe calls for a cup of sugar for every cup of tomatoes, and of course, because it was a sleepy summer afternoon, I had to stop off at Starbucks. Once we had gotten all that out of the way, I filled up a pot with water and began boiling the tomatoes to peel them. That was easy. 1. Drop plum tomatoes in boiling water. 2. Leave them for a minute or so. 3. Fish them out with a slotted spoon. 4. If the skin hasn't cracked, pierce it with a knife. 5. The skin comes right off.
Then I chopped up two oranges and one lemon and threw it all into my soup pot, along with the chopped tomatoes that I had first drained and measured.  Tomatoes contain a good deal of water, which, if you don't drain it off, you have to boil off.I had eight cups of tomatoes, so I needed eight cups of sugar. The sugar dissolved right into the tomatoes. After a few minutes of boiling, the tomatoes gave up their juice, so I had tomato and citrus solids floating in a sea of tomato juice.
The recipe says to stir constantly to prevent burning. If you set the gas on medium, and check it occasionally, you should have no problem just stirring it every so often. If you did stir it constantly, you would drop dead from fatigue because it has to boil for something like 4 hours.
I kept complaining about how long it seemed to be taking for the marmalade to jell. Bob responded that I was too impatient, and I should know that marmalade takes a long time to make, because I have made it before. It really did take about four hours.
If you want an explanation of "sheeting off the spoon," read the jams and preserves section of The Joy of Cooking. Irma Rombauer Becker has a diagram and everything.
This recipe has a considerable amount of cinnamon and cloves flavoring it. My  husband says it tastes like Christmas. It is well worth the boiling time. You do not have to seal the jars in a boiling water bath. You seal the jars with melted paraffin, which is available in hardware stores and some grocery stores in areas where people can (as in preserve food in jars.)

Tomato Marmalade

8 pounds ripe plum tomatoes, approximately
boiling water
3 oranges
3 lemons
8 sticks cinnamon
1 tablespoon whole cloves
sugar (lots of sugar. Buy a new large sack of the stuff.)

1. Dip the tomatoes, a few at a time, into a kettle of boiling water. Remove skin, chop tomatoes roughly and measure four quarts. (16 cups) Let stand while preparing the oranges and lemons.
2. Finely chop the skin and pulp of the oranges and lemons.
3. Place in a large kettle. Add the cinnamon sticks and cloves.
4. Pour off and discard most of the tomato liquid that has accumulated in the tomatoes. Measure the tomatoes and add to the kettle. Add one cup of sugar for each cup of tomatoes.
5. Bring to a boil, stiring until the sugar is dissolved. Boil, stirring, to prevent sticking, until the marmalade sheets off the spoon, registers 220 degrees on a candy thermometer or a drop chilled on a plate leaves a track when pushed by a finger.
6. Remove the cinnamon sticks and most of the cloves. Ladle the marmalade into  hot sterilized jars. Top with two thin layers of melted paraffin. Allow to cool. Cover and store in a cool, dry place. Makes about 24 six ounce jars.

Bourbon "Brandied" Peaches

Bourbon "Brandied" Peaches have a history with me, or at least, a story. I remember my father talking about burying jars of brandied peaches on the lawn to give them time to age. I also remember him saying that the burier then forgot where said peaches were buried, so holes were dug all over the lawn to find the peaches. Forty-five years later, I still have a mental image of our lawn in Massachusetts with holes all over it, as if it had been attacked by an army of gophers.
Someone named boyzoma on www.Chowhound.com also remembers his father burying brandied peaches in holes in the yard, so clearly I'm not hallucinating. Since my father's peaches were buried in either Massachusetts or Connecticut, he must have had to dig down pretty deep to put them below the frost line. If the jars froze, they would explode, right?
Well, rest assured, you don't have to bury these peaches. In fact, they are delectable immediately after they are canned. They are really good, and fabulous with cream. It's peach season. Buy some cheap bourbon, go to your local pick-your-own establishment, and get to work. You will need a case of wide mouth quart canning jars, rings and lids, a kettle called a boiling water bath, and a rack to lift the hot jars out of the water. The jars, rings and lids are probably available now, in July and August, at your local supermarket. The boiling water bath you can get from Walmart or Williams Sonoma, or a hardware store in a community that cans.
What you should not do is use the recipe as written in The New York Times Heritage Cookbook. If there was ever an instance where Jean Hewitt did not test her recipes, (and, as you constant readers of this blog will know, she didn't) this is one.
Hewitt starts out telling her readers to obtain about 80 good size peaches for 9 to 12 quarts of peaches, and then make a syrup using 4 cups of water and nine pounds of sugar. As anyone with even an elemental knowledge of mathematics or cooking would know, 4 cups of water is barely enough to moisten nine pounds of sugar. Also, twelve quart jars, even filled with whole peaches, would need at least two cups each to fill in around the peaches So that makes 24 cups or 8 quarts of water or at least two gallons. I say at least because the directions say to cook the syrup down to make it thicker.
Maybe today's peaches are bigger than those back in the day. I had 12 peaches, which made almost enough  to fill four quart jars. If 12 quarts of peaches sound like too many peaches, 15 should be enough to make 4 quarts, and for 12 quarts you wouldn't need more than 60 peaches.
Make sure your peaches are ripe, especially if you buy them at the grocery store. I left mine in a bowl on the counter for a week, until Bob pointed out that they were definitely ripe and I had better can them soon before I would have to throw them away.  At that point, if you put them in boiling water for a couple of minutes, they are easy to peel.
I actually got caught in the mathematics of reducing the recipe. I started out with 4 cups of water, and about three cups of sugar, mainly because that was all the sugar we had.. Then, I just dumped in the bourbon. I recognize that this is not particularly helpful for novices who wish to create an authentic recipe. I must have used about 2 cups of bourbon. I ended up having to make more syrup. About the muslin bag that is supposed to enclose the cinnamon sticks and the cloves. I didn't have a muslin bag, or the patience to make one, so I threw the cinnamon sticks in whole and put the cloves in a tea ball. You could just throw in the cloves too and fish them out with a slotted spoon before you poured the syrup into the jars. Don't get caught up in irrelevant details.
I did boil the syrup, do the math and discover what 222 degrees Fahrenheit works out to in degrees Celsius. The answer is 103 degrees Celsius. I probably boiled the syrup for half an hour and then filled the jars. At that point, I had to go back and make more syrup because I did not have enough.
At the end, the recipe says "Seal." Huh? Seal means boil your jars of canned food in the boiling water bath for a set amount of time. Different fruits and vegetables have to be processed for different times. According to the Ohio State University Extension Service, peaches in quart jars should be processed in boiling water for 30 minutes. So, put the jars in the water and make sure they are covered, turn on the heat, and when the water starts boiling, set the timer. This kills germs in the food and prevents botulism, a very unpleasant result of improper canning.
So, is this worth the effort? I think so, especially if you like peaches and bourbon. Read up on the canning process first.. There are many websites that can instruct you.
In case you are wondering why these are Bourbon Brandied Peaches, I am too. If anyone knows, please instruct the rest of us.

Bourbon "Brandied" Peaches

60 ripe peaches
9 pounds sugar
12 cups of water
4 sticks cinnamon, broken
2 tablespoons whole cloves
2 fifths bourbon

1. Scald the peaches, a few at a time and peel.
2. Dissolve the sugar in the water. Tie the cinnamon sticks and cloves in a muslin bag (or put the cloves in a tea ball and put the cinnamon sticks in whole. Bring to a boil. When syrup is clear, add the peaches a few at a time, and simmer until barely tender. Do not overcook.
3. Drain fruit on a platter, returning excel syrup to pan, and repeat until all fruit is cooked. Boil the syrup until it is slightly thickened. (222 degrees on a candy thermometer.) Cool slightly.
4. Stir in the bourbon. Place the fruit as it drains in hot sterilized jars. Cover with bourbon syrup. Seal. Store in cool, dark, dry place. Makes nine to twelve quarts of peaches.

Danish Cones with Whipped Cream

This is one of the recipes that is a mystery. Exactly what is it supposed to turn out as? I had never eaten, seen, or even heard of Danish cones, and so had no idea what I was producing.  My Danish cones turned out to be pancakes filled with whipped cream. Very delicious, and received rave reviews from the guests at my friend Mary Alice's party for her daughter Ellen's college graduation. However, I couldn't shake the notion that what I was supposed to have was a crisp cookie like cone filled with whipped cream.
The Internet was not a lot of help here. Only one recipe for Danish cones contained a picture, and that showed a tube-shaped glazed doughnut sort of affair. The recipes were not markedly different.
There is one Danish cone that is produced with a patterned rolling pin, and produces a lacy cone, but that wasn't the recipe I had. If readers would be kind enough to send us their recipes for Danish cones, or merely their reminiscences on the topic, it would be much appreciated.  I know you are out there. My hits have gone way up (for me), but y'all don't comment or write reviews, or tell us all about food in your childhood. Tsk.
It took about an hour and a half to make these. Like I said, they are pancakes. The cook makes the batter, spreads ovals of batter onto a "well-buttered baking sheet" (I used well-buttered parchment paper.) and bakes them in a 300 degree oven for 6 minutes.

Cones, not cylinders

You have to get them off the baking sheet and rolled into cones before they cool and crack. This takes a degree of manual dexterity that I don't have. I told my husband, who is pretty manually dexterous, that he needed to hang around the kitchen so he could be there when the six minutes were up and roll the things into cones. As it happened, when the timer went off, he was nowhere to be found. My screams finally ran him to ground in the basement. In the meantime, I rolled two or three of them into cylinders. Cylinders are not cones, as any third grader in the District of Columbia should be able to tell you.
Bob rolled the remaining pancakes into cones, and we ate the cylinders. The cookbook says to add a little strawberry jam to the center of the whipped cream in each cone. My genius husband took a fair dollop of raspberry jam and added it to the cream as he was whipping it. It was delicious.
One thing I did to the recipe was to add two tablespoons of milk. The first pancakes were thicker than they needed to be, so we diluted the batter a little.
As long as you are not a total klutz, and can enlist someone with nimble fingers to stand by, these are not difficult. Follow the directions about the well buttered baking sheet or parchment paper, or you will have a baking sheet full of adherent masses of pancake.

Danish Cones with Whipped Cream

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
3/4 cup flour
2 tablespoons of milk (or more if you want thinner pancakes.)
one cup heavy cream
strawberry or raspberry jam

1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.
2. Melt the butter and stir in the sugar. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, and then the flour and the milk.. Drop spoonfuls of the batter about four inches apart onto a well-buttered baking sheet. Smooth the batter into ovals. Bake about six minutes.
3. Remove the cookies with a spatual and quickly roll into cone shapes while cookies are still hot and flexible. (Gloves may be handy in doing this.) Let cones cool.  Rebutter the baking sheet before each addition.
4. At serving time, whip the cream and fill the cones with it. Add a little strawberry jam (or at least 3 tablespoons of raspberry jam) to the cream as you whip it.  Makes about 15.

Game Sauce

Game Sauce is one of the most amazing recipes in the New York Times Heritage Cookbook, up there with crab-stuffed chicken, (October 4, 2010). I had meant to make it at Christmas when we had venison, and had even bought the current jelly at Rodman's, the gourmet food/appliance store on Wisconsin Avenue in DC. However, the best-laid plans of mice, men and cooks often come to naught.
I made the game sauce to go with pheasant cacciatori, which I served on Saturday to our old friends, Rich and Mary Alice and their two daughters. Ellen, the youngest one, is our goddaughter. We haven't done much over the years for her spiritual development, so I thought the least we could do was invite her and her parents to dinner to celebrate her graduation from college.
If you look at the ingredient list for game sauce, you will soon realize how it could not possibly fail. It starts out with half a cup of butter, an ingredient sure to insure success in any recipe and moves on to six onions, orange juice, current jelly and a riotous assortment of booze.
I was smart and started it around three o'clock. The whole process of cooking the onions in the butter "until transparent and tender" and then simmering the jelly and the orange juice so it "partially caramelizes" is a time consuming one. It took at least an hour. I kept cooking and tasting and moaning in delight. First the buttery sweetness of the onions, then the flavor burst of the orange juice, and finally, sherry, cassis and  cognac. Heaven!!
You could just eat this stuff with a spoon. It doesn't have to be served with game. (If you have images of yourself stalking a pheasant or a deer through the streets of Manhattan, fear not. You can buy virtually anything on the Internet.) Game sauce would be good over chicken or turkey, or just a piece of bread.
Please note that the recipe requires Duff Gordon amontillado sherry. This is not  cheap kitchen sherry. If you have never had sherry, get a bottle and put it away for the fall. When the weather gets cool, pour yourself a glass, straight, and sip it before dinner. A feeling of calm and civilization will slide over you, as if you were suddenly transported to the drawing rooms of Mayfair. Cassis, on the other hand, is a hot weather drink, or more correctly a hot weather additive. Put about 2 tablespoons of cassis into a cold glass of white wine, and you have a kir. Add it to a glass of champagne, and you have a kir royale.  If good sherry transports you to Mayfair, kirs will transport you to the sidewalk cafes of Monmartre. It's all good. As far as the cognac goes, I just buy the cheap stuff in little bottles.
While making this, I discovered something I didn't know before. My candy thermometer is Celsius, not Fahrenheit. I can do the conversion, but not in my head (it involves multiplying fractions) so I just kind of winged it. Even though the directions for candy are extremely precise, winging it seemed to work with the candied orange peel.

Game Sauce

6 large onions, cut into eighths
1/2 cup butter
2 juice oranges
1 eight ounce jar black current jelly (I bought red. I don't think it matters.)
1 teaspoon salt
2 navel oranges
1 cup sugar
1 cup Duff Gordon amontillado sherry
1 jigger cassis
1 jigger cognac or Armagnac
drippings from roasting game or stock

1. In a heavy casserole or pan, sauté the onions in the butter until transparent and tender. Squeeze the juice oranges and add the juice to the casserole. Add the jelly and salt. Cook slowly, so that the sugar in the jelly does not burn, until the sauce is brown, partially caramelized.
2. Meanwhile, with a vegetable peeler, peel the navel oranges so that only the orange-colored park is removed. Cut the strips into tiny slivers about one and one-half inches long and one-sixteenth inch wide.
3  Place in a small pan, cover with water, bring to a boil and boil ten minutes Drain and discard water.
4. Dissolve the sugar in one-third cup water. Boil in another small pan until syrup registers 230 degrees on a candy thermometer. Remove from the heat and stir in the rained peel Let stand at least thirty minutes.
5. Remove the browned sauce from the heat and stir in the sherry, cassis and candied orange slivers. Just before serving, stir in the cognac and drippings.
Makes about two and a half cups.

Pheasant Cacciatore

I always thought of pheasant as a fall dish. We used to have it at Thanksgiving when my father had either shot one, or had friends that shot one. It seemed to involve a lot of work for my mother, the cook, which always made her irritable. Holidays in our house were usually somewhat fraught, with my mother flaring up at us, my father being what he called "shirty" in response (no, I didn't add an extra letter there. It really was "shirty.") and my sister and I trying to show that we really appreciated all the work she went to. Fun times.
But, rest assured, if you like to cook, this is not an unnecessary amount of work, and should not make you snap at your family.
About eating it in late June. Well, with the advent of gourmet poultry producers and the Internet, etc. etc., everything is available all the time. I don't approve of this availability when it comes to fruits and vegetables. It has given us the cardboard tomato and the Styrofoam strawberry. But with meat, what's the harm? It wasn't a Styrofoam pheasant. If you would eat a roast chicken in the summer, you could eat a pheasant as well.
On Saturday afternoon, I bought a pair of pheasants, (known as a brace) at Market Poultry in Eastern Market on Capitol Hill in DC. They have a quantity of game for sale as well as the chicken, turkey, chicken sausage, chicken parts, etc. They have venison, quail, and even turtle meat, which annoyed me, since I had just spent a ton of money ordering snapping turtle meat on line for another recipe. Stay tuned, lucky readers! The pheasants were frozen, so I plunged them into a pot of hot water to defrost and left them there for a couple of hours while I made the game sauce.
Frozen pheasants are like frozen chickens. All the innards come tidily packaged in plastic. So don't be alarmed at all this talk of plucking, cleaning and reserving tail feathers. There are no tail feathers on a frozen pheasant. I remember my mother plucking game birds. I have to say, I prefer frozen. All those feathers flying around made a real mess. Also you have to watch out for the buckshot.
One good reason to make Pheasant Cacciatore in the summer is the availability of fresh herbs. This year, Bob stopped talking about how he wanted a garden and planted one. Although we have had enough rain to float a Volkswagen, the only thing that really seems to have prospered are the herbs. I went outside with a little bowl and a pair of scissors and snip, snip, snip, I had my herbs.
Juniper berries are the flavoring in gin. Sniffing a bottle brought back memories of my parents' martinis. One memorable and not to be repeated evening, I drank what was left in the cocktail shaker and had to sneak into the bathroom and throw up before dinner. But we are not flavoring gin here. Juniper berries are available at Whole Foods. Spice Islands, the gourmet spice company of the 1960s, used to sell them, but at some point it stopped. They are not very hard to chop up.
I always think of cacciatore as a tomato, green pepper and garlic based dish. This is basically roast pheasant coated inside and out with a spice mixture. It is not hard.

Pheasant Cacciatore

1 brace (pair) of pheasant, plucked, cleaned and tail feathers reserved
1 tablespoon juniper berries
2 tablespoons salt
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 teaspoons chopped chives
1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary or one teaspoon dried rosemary
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 teaspoon olive oil
4 thick slices bacon
cognac
game sauce
 bulgur or wild rice

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
2. Wash out the body cavity of the birds (discard liver, heart etc. if birds have been hung) and dry with paper towels. (The etc. is wrapped in plastic, so just take it out and throw it away.)
3. If juniper berries are soft, chop on a board; if they are dry, pound well in a mortar. Combine berries with the salt, cayenne, chives, rosemary and parsley.
4. Divide two-thirds of the mixture between the two body cavities and shake the birds to coat the walls. Place the birds, breast side up, in a roasting pan lined with oiled aluminum foil.
5. Pat the oil over the surface of the birds and then sprinkle remaining herb-spice mixture over all the surface. Cover the birds with the bacon slices, securing with toothpicks if necessary.
6. Roast twenty minutes. Reduce oven heat to 325 degrees and roast about one hour longer, or until birds are done.
7. Place pheasants on a warm platter. Sprinkle a little cognac over the birds and decorate with the reserved tail feathers. Serve game sauce and bulgur or wild rice separately. Makes five servings.