Thankyou for your patience (Part I)

Meat Weeks 12, 13, 14, 15 & 16. Thursday 19th March - Wednesday 22nd April.

That's right, a blog entry written at the end of June covers 5 weeks in March and April. Ridiculous.

I am well aware of how crappy I've been. I've been incredibly lax, but, as time went by, and the number of meats I was going to have to write about increased, I just found it more and more difficult to sit down and write the thing, mainly due to my massive levels of lethargy. I did, on multiple occasions, sit down with Blogspot open, ready to go, but couldn't just quite bring myself to type. But then, I came up with both a surge of energy, and an elegant solution. Firstly, I promised myself I was going to finally do this. I was finally going to get caught up, and give my legion of fans what they had been waiting so long for. Secondly, I decided to do something to help both myself and you, and break it down into three separate chunks, so that I didn't feel like I was going to be here hours (although, now I've started, there's every chance that I will just do them all, as it's easier to carry on than it is to start), and also so that it was less work for you guys to read. Not that anything I ever write would be classed as work, elegant and wonderful as it is, but there you go.

And finally, rather than continuing with my theme of early paragraph apologies, I'm going, instead, to make a pledge. From now on, if I go more than 2 weeks without an update, and without a very good reason (if it's good enough, incidentally, will be decided by me, but I'm not going to take the mick - I'm talking major disaster or being out of the country here) then anyone who was following the blog at the point of the previous entry (in this case, there are 10 of you) will receive £1 from my own personal pocket for every day over the fortnight. That oughta motivate me.

So, with the parish notices done, let's move on to the real business of the day...

Cast your mind back to the murky depths of March, when we last met. It is, for the most part, a pretty dull-ass month - occasionally they'll wheel out Easter just to titillate you, but then it won't visit again for years. However, in this vast expanse of dull, there is one bright spot - my friend Sheli's birthday.

To honour this, and as touched upon in my previous entry, we'd had a day of Mini-Golf and other excitingness at the Trafford Centre, and Laura had decided to buy me a load of insects as an apology for having been a right narky cow that morning. The mealworms were eaten on the day, as I'd had them already, and the scorpion, crickets and ants were taken home for future eating. We didn't have to wait long.

As I've still not gotten round to writing up a provisional list of critters to devour, there have been multiple occasions where the meat choice of the week has been a very last minute thing. That's one of the reasons it's such a good idea for me to always have things in reserve. This week, it was the crickets that rescued me. After our weekly 'Apprentice' dinner, held every Wednesday of the shows run with friends who live upstairs, I reached for the bag.

Unlike the mealworms, which were pretty generic looking things, there was absolutely no ambiguity over what I was about to eat. Although these bugs had also been dried prior to packing, you could clearly see the eyes, wings, legs, and everything else that makes up a cricket. The Thai Green Curry flavoured coating (which didn't fill me with glee, as I really aren't that keen on curry) did nothing other than give them a sickly looking yellowish-green hue. Still, having survived mealworms, I now had no qualms whatsoever about biting one of the little fella's heads off.

Once again, and this appears to be a point I might make fairly regularly in my eating of insects, they were dusty. The drying process renders the creature almost pointless to eat, and I'm fairly sure there can be barely any nutrients left in them after it. However, that wasn't the point. The point was, it was yet another animal eaten on this quest, and, as animals go, it's a fairly unusual one, so I'll chalk it up to experience and hope that I get a chance at some point to eat fresh crickets - from what I've read in the past, when fried, they're pretty delicious.

The last weekend of March saw, as usual, the farmer's market make its merry way back to Lark Lane, affording me, once again, with an opportunity for some interesting animalistic purchases. Having decided against the month before, this time I went ahead and bought a rabbit - skinned but not boned - as well as some smoked eel. Laura didn't seem too happy about the idea of the rabbit, as she had never eaten it before, and has to overcome an innate fear of eating pet and cute animals every time she does it for the first time. Personally, I've never had that problem. I have no idea what that says about me.

Anyway, I decided to cook the rabbit in a pie, mainly to make it a little easier for Laura to chow down on. Rabbit is one of my absolute favourite meats, as it has such a strong flavour, quite unlike the usual farmyard animals that we eat, which I imagine is due to the incredible leanness of the meat, and the massive amount of muscle contained within the animal. Anyway, I modified my chicken pie recipe, which, incidentally, I've become a bit of a past-master at by this point, using beef rather than chicken stock for a meatier sauce, pepper in place of courgette (although, to be fair, this was only because we didn't have a courgette, and the shop had run out. I'd never do this normally as I don't really like peppers, but figured the rabbit would be strong enough to cover most of the horribleness) and, obviously, rabbit rather than chicken. Which brought it's own problems.

You see, the chap at the market who'd sold me the rabbit had said that, if I boiled it up for 10 minutes, the meat would simply fall off the bones. Fair enough, seems easy enough. What he hadn't told me, was that this was wrong. Very, very wrong. It appeared that the rabbit still had it's lower layer of skin on, which was holding all the meat tightly in, so, having boiled him, I then had to take as much as the remaining skin off as possible and then spend about 20 minutes trying to get as much meat as possible off of the bones. As anyone who's ever eaten rabbit will probably know, there isn't a great deal of meat on there to begin with, so every bit is important, and the last thing I wanted to be doing was throwing any away. When I'd stripped him as much as I thought possible, the pie was made, decorated and stuck in the oven.



Yep, that's right, I've got artistic pastry skills.

It was something of a triumph, which confirmed that I can make anything into a pie. On top of that, Laura loved it, despite feeling a bit strange about eating a bunny. I told her to get over it - bunny or not, he was utterly delicious. For anyone who hasn't eaten rabbit before, it's quite difficult to describe. It's one of the strongest meaty flavours I can think of, and I would recommend it to anyone.

The following week saw me in Birmingham, as a convenient stopping point for a weekend with friends in Nottingham. I brought with me my smoked eel, which, once again, I left till the very last minute to tuck into. The smoking process had given them that particular flavour, and, being a fish, I found that they tasted quite a lot like kippers. However, there was a slight edge to them which kippers don't have, and the thing that really set them apart was their texture. They're a much meatier fish than most, which I suppose makes sense given that an eel is essentially just a long tube of muscle, and they were much slimier to the touch than any other smoked food I'd ever had. To be honest, I'd always wanted to try eel as I'd seen so many people say how tasty they were, but had only ever seen them previously in jellied form, which turned my stomach slightly (and there's not many meats I'll say that about), and so had never really found the nerve to do it. Having now tried them, I'll say that, although there was nothing particularly bad about them, it's not something I'll be clamouring to get hold of again.

I had also thrown in my bag my little pot of chocolate covered ants. Knowing that Ben was going to be in Nottingham, I had decided I'd bring them with me and see if he fancied trying one. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about them when he was around, and ended up eating them on Easter Sunday morning, after breakfast. Well, actually, I didn't eat all of them there and then, opting to save a couple to try and freak some people out with later. Laura, who by this point had pretty much given up on trying most things with me unless they could conceivably come in joint form or were conspicuously mammalian, refused to try one. I did, however, manage to coerce one gent into having a go. Despite being a southerner, Stooz is a good sport it would seem. I warned him beforehand that, like the other dried insects I had had, the ants were dry and dusty in the mouth, and it was best to eat them with a drink at hand to wash down the bits. Apparently, I didn't go far enough with my warnings - his face was a picture.

The chocolate covered ants were fairly hefty - a good half inch in length, and nearly a centimetre tall once I'd uncovered one of them. It was interesting to take the chocolate off and see the insect underneath - completely preserved with all it's segments clearly visible. Of course, they didn't actually taste of anything, and the chocolate that covered them wasn't of particularly high quality, but this wasn't about culinary value, dammit - it was about eating some ants and freaking out a group of my friends. In that respect, they were awesome.

So, having completed that week a full three and a half days early, I had a little time to relax prior to meat 16...but then all too quickly, Tuesday had rolled around and I'd decided upon nothing. I started to worry a little until a thought hit me - my poor, unloved wood pigeon breasts, resting in the freezer. Finally, their day had come. I extracted them from their icy resting place to defrost, and looked up recipes.

As Wednesday came round, I was preparing to do wood pigeon with sweet potato rosti, buttered cabbage and a red wine sauce (if I do something, I tend to try and overdo it, if I'm honest). And was I successful? What do you think?

If your answer was 'no, definitely not,' by the way, then you're right. It was an unmitigated disaster, and by far the most disappointing week of the challenge thus far. The rosti burnt, and stuck to the pan but not itself, the wood pigeon was overcooked and tough, the cabbage just tasted like normal cabbage that I'd melted some butter on, and the red wine sauce was a mess - it didn't thicken, and just sat on the plate looking horrible. I was so disappointed, not just for me and Laura, who now had a crappy dinner to eat, but for my poor, much maligned wood pigeon - to have been saved for so long, only to end up in such a mess must have been particularly disheartening for his sad little ghost. I swore there and the that I would get more, and do him proud. Possibly in something a little less ridiculously ambitious next time...

So there you have it, 5 weeks of meats that happened nearly three months ago. As I promised earlier, there will be two more updates to come, and, believe me, they will be much more timely than has recently been the case. But, for now, I have to go to the shops for some ingredients - I've been roped into making a pie tonight...

Stay Meaty!

Oh, and, as usual, for those keeping score, here's the updated table, including, finally, weeks 12-16:

Herbivore Mammals
Bovine - Cow, Week 2
Ovine - Sheep, Week 5
Marsupia
Rodentia - Rabbit, Week 13

Omnivore Mammals
Porcine - Pig, Week 1
Rodentia (a different one to the herbivore one)

Carnivore Mammals
Canine

Arthropods
Insecta
- Winged - Crickets, Week 12
- Unwinged – Mealworms, Week 10 (Mealworm Beetle Larva); Ants, Week 15
Arachnid
Crustatia
- Land
- Sea

Reptilia
Lizard/Snake

Amphibians
Frog/toad

Fish
Scaled fish - Salmon, Week 6; Eel, Week 14
Flat fish
Shark

Mollusca
Bivalvia – Mussels, Week 11
Cephalopoda - Octopus, Week 8.
Gastropoda

Plus 10 different types of Bird - Turkey, Week 3; Chicken, Week 4; Ostrich, Week 7; Wood Pigeon, Week 16
Plus 2 Animals from classifications NOT on the list – Deer (Cervine), Week 9.