Poultry Surprise

So I was making dinner for Mariko a few days ago and thought it would be a good time to introduce her to pheasant. I had thawed out some of the meat I'd brought from America, so I breaded it in flour/seasonings and fried it up. The thing with pheasant meat, though, is that it was killed with a shotgun. Which leads to a term that, as far as I'm concerned, my cousin Jason coined back when I was a kid: poultry surprise.


I got the first surprise. I was carefully chewing, aware I might win, when I bit down on something hard. I fished the lead pellet out of my mouth and put it on the table. Mariko was surprised, but not disgusted. A promising sign. I carefully sorted through the remaining pieces and succeeded in giving her what I thought would be pellet-free. But I ate the remainder and ended up spitting out nine pellets.