FFF - valentine's day dinner

Dinner went well last night, thus qualifying for fabulous food friday. We had some Lundberg Wild Rice Blend, sauteed Swiss chard, and this:

Pheasant with Port and Cherry Sauce

The original recipe is for pork tenderloin, sliced into 16 medallions. I used pheasant instead.

1 cup ruby port
1/3 cup dried sweet cherries
4 teaspoons seedless raspberry jam
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
1 tablespoon butter

Add the cherries to the port and let them soak while the pheasant cooks.

Pan fry the pheasant pieces, keeping in mind that pheasant dries out quickly if cooked too long. Remove from the pan and keep warm.

In the same pan combine the port, cherries, jam and mustard. Bring to a boil in the frying pan. Cook until reduced to 1/2 cup (about three minutes). Remove from the heat. Stir in butter with a whisk and serve over the meat. 

I cooked way about twice as much pheasant as we needed, even though I put some of it back into the freezer when it was partially thawed. Not sure what I am going to do with a whole bunch of cooked pheasant pieces. I had a lovely pheasant hash at Lidia's for brunch a few years back, but that was done with ground pheasant. I'll have to search for a recipe and try to use it up anyway.

I served it with some red wine in schmancy new wine glasses. It wasn't bad for cheap. The wine, I mean. It was cheap. Not the glasses, even if I did get them at Target. I felt that it was important to mark 5 years since CD proposed with some addition to our household. The glasses seemed like a reasonably good choice.

The chocolate mousse I made for dessert was discussed in an earlier post and the recipe is here. (I used 85% Valrhona and they are not kidding about higher percentage chocolate leading to a denser finished product.) Though I cut the recipe in half, the margarita glasses I used were rather full. To add insult to injury, I finished them with freshly whipped cream. That's a lot of chocolate. And fat. Yum.