Along with house renovations and developing a new business, it’s hard to forget that we live on a working small-holding. There are some inevitable parts of farming which one doesn’t tend to think about whilst perusing the meat isles in Tesco’s. You purchase your nicely packaged bits of meat and the hardest part is coming up with something tasty to do with it. There is however an awful lot of work which goes in to getting that piece of meat into your fridge and I now have a much greater appreciation for that process. I’ll spare you the gory details but let’s just say 6 out of 12 of our new batch of chickens were cockerels and alas surplus to requirements.
Tasty as our free range, organic chickens are I had my eye on another type of bird for the dinner table. There are a few pheasants roaming around these parts and so I started doing a bit of target practice using Harry’s air rifle and a few old tin cans. I was getting pretty good at hitting my target when one lunch time I seized my opportunity.
Dinner
We hung it for 3 days in the shed and rather than plucking and gutting as we did with the chickens, removed the leg and breast meat all ready for Amy’s Casserole dish. I’d never shot anything before and didn’t find the whole process particularly enjoyable but there is something rather satisfying in catching your own dinner.