A right good feed!

While I took Alex, Graham and Izzy to Eauze market this morning, Nick and Kieran fitted the shower and cubicle in the new bathroom; it just needs the silicon sealant now, my job tomorrow.

There’s a deer  and wild boar farm near here, with a restaurant attached, which has a good reputation, so we treated ourselves to lunch there today. What a feed! We started with garbure (mountain soup), then two types of pate, followed by civet de cerf (slow cooked venison stew). These were just leading up to the main course; huge steaks of either venison or wild boar, venison sausages, magret de canard (duck breast), all cooked to perfection over a roaring log fire. Izzy was concerned for the health of the chicken whose leg she ate, asking, in all sincerity “How does a chicken with only one leg walk, Mummy?”. Chocolate mousse, coffee and armagnac followed, to much groaning and holding of stomachs.

After lunch, we went for a walk around the cerf farm, complete with a bucket of corn for Izzy to feed to the deer and the wild boar (great fun till she touched her arm on the electric fence!). Part way round the walk we met the front of house man  from the restaurant, now a farmer again, who gave us a tour of his armagnac chai. He produces a barrel a year and has barrels going back to 1996, but the bottles go back as far as 1962.

By the time we arrived home the weather had dried up, so we planted strawberries and did a bit of gardening, before spending about half an hour trying to encourage  Flossy and Flappy, the big chickens, to use the ladder into the hen house. The little chickens are still segregated for their own safety, and are living in the old poulailler at the moment; they’ve finally emerged from their cardboad box and happily peck at bits of bread and corn.