Game Feast: Quail and Pheasant

I'm no hunter, believe me.  I haven't taken hunter's safety.  I rarely fire a gun.  I don't like to wake up before the sun rises, and then go tromping through cold, wet fields.  I don't like to do this tromping for hours on end, as my boots get more and more heavily laden with mud.

But the men in my family really like this sport, for whatever reason, and they have honed their skills very carefully and by the acquisition of rather pricey equipment as well.

Ah well.  I'll enjoy the fruits of their labor, the spoils of their hunt, etc.

Tonight we pulled out some frozen pheasant breasts and a couple quail breasts, and we marinated them for a couple hours in a Chipotle Pepper marinade.  Then we grilled them for about fifteen, twenty minutes.

They would have been absolutely awesome if they had not been brined before freezing.  We ended up with really salty pieces of meat.  Yet they were still tender and succulent!  Not "gamey" at all.

I think quail is a bit of a delicacy in some circles, so I pointed this out to try to salvage our original excitement for the meal.  We chuckled about that as we mixed our plain brown rice and broccoli with pieces of meat, trying to douse the saltiness.

These are the quail.  Don't they look delicious?  We're begging more next time we go to my parents', and this time we'll make sure they aren't brined before we add more salt!