wild geese

There are animals all over these hills and don't we know it.  Our twenty-year deer fence has finally given up and the garden is now invaded nightly by particularly cunning deer.  They're reckoned to have escaped the culls on Rahoy so they've learnt to be nervous of people (especially people in landrovers with lights and guns) which makes them hard to get at but has not blunted their appetite for everything green and pleasant in the garden.  Even the artichokes, which are thistles dammit!

 Elsewhere on the west coast there are problems with geese which can strip grassland of the crops that both crofters and native birds rely on.  Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) has started culling Greylag geese and checking to see if this controls the population.  Since SNH is a quango and not a retailer they've been stuck for what to do with the resulting goose meat.  This Christmas some of it ended up on our table where I struggled to find any references to cooking wild as opposed to domestic goose - the birds came jointed with dark red meat, no fat (the biggest difference with the domestic birds) and a distinctly fishy smell.

In the end the breasts were pan-roasted for a fine Christmas dinner and the rest of the meat turned into a fine casserole to keep us well-fed and warm up here n the west coast while I mutter to myself about the evil deeds of deer and dream of the venison to come.

Wild Goose Casserole

* dripping or vegetable oil
* jointed meat (breasts and legs) from a couple of geese
* two chopped onions
* jar of rowan jelly
* glass of red wine
* cup of dried flageolet beans (soaked overnight and then cooked for 1.5 hours)
* 1 pint vegetable stock & salt

Heat the dripping or oil on the stovetop in an ovenproof pan that has a lid, chop the meat into cubes if possible, brown in the dripping and remove.  Add the onions and brown gently.  Add the red wine to the hot pan and stir to gather the bits and pieces stuck to the bottom, add the rowan jelly, browned goose, beans and vegetable stock.  Place the lid on and pop the pan in a medium oven (gas mark 3 / 180C) for an hour or so.  Check the seasoning, strip the meat from the legs (if you can be bothered) and you're good to go.

The ingredients for this reflect what was available in our larder - to be honest I'm not even sure if it was rowan jelly (could have been redcurrant, mixed berry or maybe even sloe) since slugs have played havoc with the labels in our pantry.  After the deer, the molluscs are next.

rain, snow and seaweed

So this is winter.  There's still a trace of lushness in the land but the beetroot leaves are, alas, just a memory now since deer got into the garden.  The fence is now rotten in too many places to patch properly.  If the deer sneeze next to the posts they'll fall down.  Hopefully we'll get a new fence in the spring and a stack of deer (who aren't supposed to be in this part of the estate anyway) will get culled this coming week.  Just to complicate matters there's been a breakout by the estate cattle who're kept up behind the house.  I'm not sure where the enclosure is so I'm hoping to walk out and check.

The winter weather of snow and ice hasn't made it to our valley yet although there are traces on the hill sufficient to prevent my lame fiat panda making it over the hill.  On the track here there are bits of seaweed from the Thursday storm and the boat has been shifted a metre or so but everything (track, house, boat) seems to be in one piece which is the crucial thing.  I'm still feeling a bit overwhelmed by the tidying up involved.  I've got a stack of clean laundry to be tidied away which is easy enough but when that's done I've got the hallway to mop then moving onto the really difficult stuff.  At some point last month the fank door was left open.  It might have been C or it might have been a passing walker (I offered a bed in the fank to a lad who's walking round the British coast, he didn't reply to the offer but he might have stuck his head in to check what was available).  The end result is the entry of the pine marten who shat all over the bathroom floor and had great fun with the bags of artisan flour left lying around.  All this mess is lying around C's half-installed CCTV system.

This probably explains why I'm sitting in my pyjamas at midday for the second day running, waiting for inspiration or enthusiasm to strike.  Fortitude, fine coffee and a decent fire should get me going.