Congee Mk 3 - split-pea and red-braised partridge

I've made congee a couple of times before. I love the idea of it: a bland starchy base  topped up with pleasingly strong toppings. My recent discovery of the superb Food and Drink Chengdu lead to the inevitable trawl through the archive and a hoarding of tasty looking dishes. One that took my fancy was a rice and pea soup, a liquid congee type mixture of rice and split-peas.

pre-partridge

I've had a couple of partridges in the freezer for a long time. And there in, perhaps, lies the problem. Emboldened by a recent red-braised pork dish which was a wonder of sweet and spice I thought I'd try the same treatment on the aged partridge.

• rice and split-peas
• meat (try fatty pork, or chicken?)
• sugar, star anise, dried chilli, cinnamon, chilli oil, Shaoxing wine
• pickled vegetables

Start the congee - put the rice and split-peas in plenty of water in a ratio of 3:1. Boil away until you get a soupy texture. It'll take a good hour.

For the red braise I'd recommend not using partridge, at least not long-frozen ones. Perhaps this is a lesson in freezer stock-monitoring. Try fatty pork - belly or spare rib chops are ideal.

Heat some oil and add a couple of teaspoons of sugar. Melt. It will go liquid and brown. Splosh in a few good shakes of Shaoxing cooking wine (dry sherry is often suggested in lieu of it should you be lacking) and stir. Chuck in a star anise, a few dried chillies and a stick of cinnamon. Add the meat and top up with water. Simmer for forty minutes and when nearly ready reduce the liquid a bit.

When the congee is ready put a portion of meat on top, spoon over some braising sauce, top with chilli oil and add a little preserved vegetable.

post-partridge

Good in theory, this dish could come to life with some nicely braised tender meat. As it was, the partridge was dry, stringy, musky and rather tough. The legs were especially unappetising; borderline inedible in fact. In the end I shredded the breast meat and stirred it into the mixture.

It's also possible that I don't really like partridge that much. I might loose food-cred points but I'm not sure that fiddly, muddy tasting, micro-fowl are the way forward in life.

Pheasant stew

One of the better presents I got for xmas this year was two dead pheasants in a plastic bag. I have never hung, plucked, skinned or gutted a pheasant or any game bird but that, of course, made the process all the more interesting.

Hugh suggests around five days for the ideal hanging period and that, through happy circumstance rather than supreme planning skills, was exactly what these guys got. The hanging was done in a plastic bag suspended on string through the window of my sitting room and anchored to the radiator. The hanging process gives flavour and character to the meat by allowing it to begin the first stages of decomposition.

The thought of plucking the birds was a little daunting so I decided simply to skin. Not remotely knowing what I was doing, I sharpened up my favourite knife and slit the skin down the front of the birds' chests. This peeled off fairly easily and a few more slices around the top bit of the legs meant I could rip off a trouser like configuration of copper feathers and sticky skin. Some more cutting at the head end allowed me to get the crop out – packed full of grain in both birds - without puncture. Slashing the abdomen released the innards into the bin. The livers of the birds seemed incredibly hard and distended – a result, perhaps, of them gorging on freely available grain – but the pungency of their viscera disinclined me to root through the bloody strings and clumps in the bin and I must embarrassingly admit I chucked the lot. Just think – possibly two natural and humane pheasant foie gras wasted. Oh for shame.

The legs were easy to snap off and remove but I ended up chopping the carcass in a rather irregular manner probably not known to any reputable school of butchery.

Check the outrageously yellow fat

I followed a really basic recipe for these – browned meat, bacon fried to render its fat, lots of standard veg (onion and both carrots and celery in big amounts to serve as an actual feature and not just background flavour mulch), wine, dried herbs and an hour-and-a-half 'pon the hob. I think white wine might have been best as the red sent the stew a grey colour.

The flavour of the pheasant was very fine. Chicken like, but with a denser and drier meat and with a musty countryside aftertaste, especially in the leg parts. The bacon and veg did the business as expected and the resulting stew, finished with a little lick of cream, was hearty and pleasingly unfussy. We ate it with potato and parsnip mash with plenty of pepper in which was a delight. Many thanks to the pheasant bringers - you know who you are.

Proper

Happy 2011 dear readers!