Column and photos by Ali Carter, Wisconsin Potato Growers Auxiliary
For full disclosure, while it may be January, this recipe was concocted and enjoyed last October.
We are a family of bird hunters and own two crazy, hyper, need-attention-always bird dogs, also known as Wirehaired Vizslas. Each autumn, I am blessed by my family’s efforts, through the help of the pups, with a freezer full of pheasant.
One autumn evening, I found myself with leftover cooked pheasant and some unused sheets of phyllo dough that hadn’t quite fit into the previous week’s pan of baklava.
Add in a couple russet potatoes from the pantry and I had the beginnings of the perfect pot pie. It turned out to be delicious!
Knowing that not everyone enjoys, or has access to, pheasant, I wrote the recipe to be made with chicken. However, I chose to share this recipe now with the idea that pot pie would also be an ideal way to use up any leftover turkey you may have from holiday gatherings.
And one more little tidbit of disclosure … you might have noticed that carrots are listed in the recipe ingredients, yet there is a lack of carrots in the photos of my pot pie. Yes, it was a carrot-less pheasant pot pie, and I missed their color and flavor.
Unfortunately, the carrots I had planned to use were a mushy mess in my produce drawer. Yuck! They went into the garbage instead of our dinner.
