This recipe recently came through my email from one of my favorite cooking sources.  And this was convenient because it used pork shoulder and pheasant meat, both of which I am trying to get rid of from our freezers in anticipation of a lot of meat needing to be stored there.  It also called for lard, and I had just received a bucket of fresh lard and suet on Butcher Day so an incentive to render the lard.  I made two quarts of it.

Isn’t it pretty, all snow white in color?  My last lard has obtained a peanut butter smell to it. I haven’t been getting sick from it but happy to have some fresh lard to use.

On Friday I made the pies.  I decided to substitute chopped carrots for mushrooms in this recipe for Tom’s benefit.  An odd substitution, I agree, but he is picky.  I ground 1 # of pork shoulder meat and added a pound of diced pheasant meat.  I don’t have a spice grinder (a gift giving idea) so I used the mortar and pestle for the juniper berries.  So later when we ate it we had to be careful not to get a chunk of the berries.  Here is the meat mixture ready to go in the crusts.

The crusts were easy to make.  I only have one meat pie mold though so I substituted some oven proof bowls I have.  Here they are ready to go in the oven.

I had quickly made some pheasant broth with the leftover carcasses with my Instant Pot.  So I used some of that broth in the pies.

I managed to forget to take photos of them baked that first evening.  We really enjoyed them, but they are quite filling.  So there is plenty left.  Here is one of the untouched pies.

This was really tasty and much better than the previous British meat pies I have made.  The flavorings were really nice, and it was good to have some vegetable in there to break up the flavor.  The mixture of pork and pheasant was nice as well.  I will be saving this recipe in the unlikely event that I have to use up pork shoulder and pheasant meat again in the future,

I only used half of the shoulder however, and it was thawed out so something needed to be done.  So I decided to grind up the rest and told Tom he could create some dinner with it while I was working yesterday.  So he found this recipe for Pork Ragu on this site.  He said it was amazing and texted me at work that I should be at home for this ragu he made.  That was kind of mean, although I did have leftover meat pie for dinner so I was OK.  But I will have the ragu tonight for dinner and hopefully it is as good as he says.