America’s Team Baked Ruffed Grouse
 | Author:
Eileen Clarke - Rifles and Recipes
Author: Rifles and Recipes |
America’s Team Baked Ruffed Grouse
Eileen Clarke - Rifles and Recipes
All over our country, this is the recipe that repeats itself more often than any other. Each region puts its mark on the recipe, but the reason it’s popular doesn’t change. It’s easy, basic, quick and delicious. Plus, it’s a beautifully festive dish you could easily serve at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Dawn Scoffield says she makes it with Dorothy Lynch’s home-style dressing, from Bob’s Thriftway.
I enjoyed this variation in the upper peninsula in Michigan where my husband and I hunted grouse and woodcock while I collected birds for my upland bird cookbook, Upland Game Bird Cookery. We put 12,000 miles on our truck hunting prairie chickens in Nebraska, quail in Arizona, chukar and more quail in Idaho, woodcock and ruffed grouse in the UP, and turkeys in New York and Alabama. Not to mention a third turkey plus a bunch of pheasant, Hungarian partridge, doves, and sharptailed and sage grouse all over Montana.
In UP Michigan the recipe was twice as big, calling for 8 or 9 birds, but we hunted with 5 other folks there, and that was a good ruffed year in UP. In Montana, you could easily cook ruffed with Franklins (fools grouse) or switch to the bigger blues, just don’t mix the smaller birds with the bigger ones or you may end up with some undercooked and some overcooked birds.
BTW: Has anyone, ever, seen someone use Lipton onion soup mix for soup?
Ingredients
1 can whole berry cranberry sauce (16 ounces)
1 bottle Catalina dressing (8 ounces)
1 pouch Lipton’s Onion Soup mix
4-5 whole ruffed grouse, plucked or skinned
1 ounce unsalted pecans, chopped
Cooking
1. Preheat the oven to 350F. In a covered roasting pan just large enough for all the birds to fit cheek to cheek, mix together the cranberry sauce, dressing and soup mix. (Heat the cranberry sauce in the microwave a bit to liquefy it, if you want.) Save the pecans for later.
2. Place the grouse breast up in the roasting pan, and ladle the sauce over them. Cover and place in the center of the preheated oven. Roast for about 40 minutes, basting with the sauce three or four times during the cooking.
3. Lift the grouse from the roaster and arrange on a heated serving dish. Pour the sauce of the grouse, sprinkle with the chopped pecans and serve immediately over rice.
Serves 3-5
Find Eileen Clarke’s Upland Game Bird Cookery book at https://www.riflesandrecipes.com/406-521-0273. Hardcover, 97 recipes from doves to turkeys, quick-fried to slow-cooked to grilled to sausage.
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PhotoCredit: Photo Credits: Eileen Clarke
Image 1 Caption: America’s Team Baked Ruffed Grouse
Photo Credits: Eileen Clarke
