Walk-Home Wendy (2)

Lucky hen walked home from the fox's clutches.

My previous post had reports of a "minor miracle" where a grey hen had escaped the clutches of our fox part way (to his) home and amazed me by coming into view, walking (to her) home from 50 yards out in the fields. My report had the hen going from out in that field to "back with the rooster", with no detail. I now need to bring you a Part 2 as it was not quite as simple as that made it all sound.

Wendy back with the rooster and now sporting a pink leg-ring
to ease finding her again. 

I had seen her come as far as the fields 'below' our boundary-bank, but then saw her walk right past the obvious track home. I took Deefer and went out through a convenient hole in the hedge to look for the other 2 dogs but also to see if I could find the hen and help her home. None of the above were anywhere to be seen so I guessed that the hen had out-manouvred me and nipped home. I gave up the search and then found, with the rooster, a suitably bedraggled grey hen. 2 and 2 makes 5. Problem solved. Write up the blog post. Move on.

Bad sign. A slew of Gloria (turkey)
feathers. Another lucky escape.

That night (Thurs 5th) was very, very wet - lashing rain that turned us back into puddle central but the next night was warm and dry and on Saturday it was so warm that I went down to see how many bees I had flying. Lots, of course, but more notable was to find, standing in a daze in the veg patch, a bedraggled grey hen with a damaged, droopy right wing. My 'walk-home' girl, of course who had obviously been delayed in her walk home by 48 hours lost in the bramble patches or under the bank, struggling to navigate. Huge apology to the hen who will not have enjoyed the wet night.

I am happy to report that the (correct) hen is now returned to the flock via a quiet night's observation, the cutting off of the long primary feathers which were drooping down to her foot and getting kicked every time she took a step (must have hurt if her 'hand' was mashed by the fox), and by the addition of a pink leg ring to help us find her among the other grey hens into the future. She has been named "Walk-Home Wendy" at least for now.

Gloria after the fox attack. 

One more fox story, at risk of driving all my readers off by becoming boring on the subject. Trust me; I would be more relieved than the average person to off the fox and stop reporting him/her. This was today at 2 pm-ish and, once more, I am off site and miss all the action. We think now that Foxy pounced on Gloria the turkey hen as she was trying to lay an egg back under that bank which I have photo'd for you before. She presumably screamed and jumped up, setting off the Guinea fowl, and then Elizabeth, and then the dogs. The fox scarpered at that point leaving Gloria but with a mouth full of feathers. We found the feathers but by then Gloria was round in the yard (along with everybody else). It seems we have had another FAILED fox strike. It's all very nerve wracking but better this than successful hunts. Our big concern now is that once the neighbouring farmers' cattle are back out on the grass we will no longer have the option to let slip the dogs of war.

Blue Hyacinths.

It's not all foxes, though, so what else is new? THE PLAY had its final 2 nights on that Friday and Saturday and went off superbly. The Friday audience were especially appreciative and noisy, laughing readily out loud, cheering enthusiastically and 'ooh'-ing and 'ah'-ing when they spotted a cast member they knew or sussed a plot twist. Performers love this and all of them seemed to rise to new levels of sparkle and effervescence. It was lovely to watch. Praise is widespread and the Players have had some lovely feed back face to face and via Social Media.

Sarah and the pigs.

Our visitor from last weekend, Sarah M, had been off down south to her friends wedding and made it back, via Galway, to be here in time to come to the Last Night. She also got to meet the stock again. She loves our pigs and the sheep, especially bottle feeding the lamb. She left us for the 2nd time, heading back to Knock Airport after a goose egg breakfast to give back the hire car and fly home.

Not an easy picture to get - pigs sleeping contented in the sun.
Usually they spot you, jump up and scamper over.

This feels like the welcome end to a very enjoyable but very exhausting month or two of fierce activity with the play, especially, building to an ever-busier climax as the rehearsals accelerated to almost daily.

We are left delighted to be able to relax and take some days off to catch up with house stuff, but both of us could not resist wandering down to the Hall to see the stage and set all dismantled and being carried away in bits to a waiting van. It all gets stored in a container on the farm of one of the Players. Elizabeth had to get in there quick to retrieve all 'our stuff' (several play 'props' were ours) before they were buried for the summer in the storage.

Larch "roses"

I think that's about it, so I'll just post a few pictures which I have not had a chance to "use up".

Pulmonaria now in good flower

A man out standing in his field.

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord...

Stir up Sunday

A blog post with at least some of those words in it is by now almost an annual tradition. A blog of mystery and unpredictability, this is obviously not. We do love this process, though and can think of no finer way of creating the 'pud' and the Christmas cake. Off then on a special shopping mission on the Saturday (25th) and some of the dried fruit doused in Jameson overnight.

Hours of fun, too, on the Sunday adding final ingredients, mixing and doing the obligatory stirs before tipping the mixes into their respective cookware, lined with grease-proof or covered in same and foil, tied down with string like Mamma used to make. Now cooked too - 8 hours gentle blupping for the pud - and left to rest for the required amount of weeks. The icing of the cake is my department - I have a cunning plan but need to source some coloured icing, which could be tricky.

Temporary fences allow the sheep to access all areas. 

Friends of the Blog following our hosting of local gardening journalist, Paul Kirwan may have been expecting our story to appear in the Roscommon Herald today but unfortunately we got 'bumped'. Paul had had a story about his involvement in Golf Course "gardening" sitting on the back burner for weeks and the paper decided to go with that one this week. 'We' are therefore postponed to next week. More on that next week, maybe.

As bad as it got slush-wise.

We had a short burst of winter over the weekend. Nothing impressive or photogenic, just lots of raw, biting wind and wet wintry showers. No real frost either, so we are very sloppy under foot and pinned down to indoor jobs.

The ever reliable duck eggs. 

Rather bizarrely, our white Sussex hen, 'Connie', has decided to go broody. We have no idea why she thinks it is Spring but just maybe she has worked out that by doing the broody thing she can sit in a lovely warm nest in a shed and be given waiter-service on the food and water, protected from piratical 'sisters' trying to drop more eggs in on her by the cage I have built around her little hidey hole.

Not so much 'frozen' as covered in a
layer of part-melted slush. The pond
goes gun-metal grey.

I have, though, stitched her up. Not wanting any more chickens just for the moment, I have slipped 5 duck eggs under her. She will not be able to check on her diary but her instinctive Day-21 will come and go. Duck eggs take 24-28 days at least to incubate. Day 28 will put her right on Christmas Day so, with luck, our guests will get to see cute, new-hatched ducklings. Chickens will generally just sit tight, unaware of any problem and not visibly concerned that the chickens look a bit 'funny'. You do then need to take the babies off the Mum by about Day 10 because the Mums get quite upset that their babies will not learn to scratch and peck and do not try to stay dry. We'll have to see how that goes.

The turkeys are still thriving and impressing us with their size. We reared three because in previous years we have given them to family, one going to Sparks for a special dinner he used to do for a gang of his Dublin builder mates. Sparks is no longer in that world and now lives outside the capital, so tells us he doesn't need one, and neither, apparently, do any of the Silverwood gang so we have three turkeys and only ourselves and our guests to satisfy. Turkey for Easter anyone? St Patrick's Day?

Finally just a couple of pics for the usual reason, that I have them. First up, Lizzie. When you are wiped out by a cold and chilled to the bone, wrap up well in the 'onesie' and under a blanket. If that's not warm enough chuck a couple of cats and a dog on the bed too. Toasty.

Next up the two grown-up boy-cats, Blue and Soldier who have lately been fighting a bit over the best roosts and nests. Here they both grabbed the top of the book-case under the stairs, with their heads against the woodwork in a quiet stand off. Anywhere you can climb, I can climb higher? In the end Soldier blinked first and jumped down, leaving Blue to stretch out luxuriously across the case-top with a rather smug look on his face. The status quo is restored. For now.

New Horizons

Pretty but disappointingly scent-less, these lily bulbs from Lidl

I wrote in the last post of our having to hospitalize one of the younger turkeys, struggling with a bloody, cut swelling on the right side of his (her?) head just behind the eye. We think this poor guy had taken a whack from the sparrowhawk before that had been chased away (unsuccessfully, you will have read) by our big male turkey, Tom. Well, the little fella struggled on moopishly through Weds, Thurs and Friday but, although we got some cod liver oil and some water into him he did not eat anything and did not recover. On Saturday he went downhill fast and by 5 pm the kindest thing seemed to be to put him out of his misery. Shame.

One turbine is up. A second, to it's left is still on the ground
in 'kit form'

On our northern skyline we suddenly have two new features, huge wind turbine towers as part of the new Roosky Windfarm. This impressive title actually only covers the pair of them. The 'farm' is around 3.5 km from here, roughly North. When the huge tall crane appeared I assumed it might be for drilling of water-wells but, no, this windfarm has had planning permission since 2003. It is all on the land of one land owner and he agreed to the farm and takes, I gather, an annual 'compensation' from the power company Gaelectric. The turbines are being assembled and erected by Moriarty.ie, a big civil engineering company.

The websites for Gaelectric and Moriarty are not that up to date but I read that the two turbines plus associated buildings, cabling and power sub-stations etc will cost around €8m, they can put out 4 MW of electricity and supply the power to 1800 homes. The towers are 84 m high and the blade (propellor) diameter is 80 m. With one blade vertical, then, the total height is 124 m or 406 feet. There will also be a meteorological mast on site.

The second turbine under construction.

Unless you have been living in a bubble these past few decades, you will know that these things are controversial and there are plenty of folk who are anti, either because they don't like them near their property, or they do not like the visual impact on scenery, or they have concerns about migrating birds and such. I have to say that I am quite supportive of the need for alternative sources of energy (though not nuclear power, till we find out how to dispose of the waste) but I do accept that we are not at the end of a design / improvement road yet.

View from our hilltop with a standard lens - not that much
of an eye-sore!

Also, I might think differently if these tall structures were our immediate neighbours, of course. We are told that they can be quite noisy when spinning in a good wind and we like our country silence. I have taken a standard-lens shot from our hill top to give you a more realistic view of what we see. Not that much of an eyesore, I think you'll agree. If you look closely at the first pic you might be able to see the many turbines of the bigger Gorteen windfarm "behind" our pair, up on that hill. If the bright sun glints on the spinning blades and white towers and there is a dark sky behind, you can see those distant turbines too. Liz and I both find them quite graceful and elegant in design.

Bob's cattle tuck into some new season silage. The weather
had been so poor for grass growth that they had grazed off
all his non-silage land and he had had to bring this group
indoors to rest the grass.

Closer to home, I am still assisting JD Bob with his cattle. (Amusing aside warning!). It is definitely "cattle" round here because these are bullocks. The word 'cows' is only applied to the females, so you can ask Bob how his cows are and he will look you straight in the eye anxious to correct your wrong impression of him as a farmer and say "I have no cows, Matt, only these bullocks and a few 'weanlings' "(young calves just off Mum's milk). I am regularly caught out by this 'trap'. Lost in translation. This has been a bit of a run around with different groups of cattle being shifted between loactions while grass fields were rested.

The outdoor group get a couple of cow-with-calf-at-foot
pairs put in with them to try to calm the flighty boys down. 

There was added drama when a couple of more flighty bullocks took off across the fields at a round-up "jumping the fence like a hunter" (said Bob) and spent some time in with Mike-the-Cows's rental grazers (and the bull, Felix). The escapists have now been extracted from that group but not before one of them over-ran his 30 month old limit for top prices at the meat factory in Ballyhaunis. This is not, apparently, the same as the 'mad-cow' age limit in the UK, but the meat factories deduct money for older cattle for quality reasons. At least one of the cattle-men I have spoken to chunters about the factories "just playing games" to diddle the farmer, when they themselves are currently doing very nicely out of the Euro/Sterling exchange rate, thank you.

White lace cap hydrangea.

For me this 'work' is nearly done. Bob is getting better each day from his leg injury, most of the cattle from the indoor groups have now been returned to their rested fields and the 'escapists' plus a few more are due to be collected by the meat-factory's cattle-truck in a few days. I will miss them (especially gentle old 274 with his pale-buff limousin colouring and big soft eyes, bless him). I like cattle and I admire these beefy, chunky 2-year olds, plus I like working with them. We do not have the land or infra-structure to 'do' any of the full sized commercial-beef animals ourselves, but we have talked about keeping one or two of the diminutive Dexter variety. Dreams, I guess. May never happen.

The bee blanket in use this week.

Even closer to home, Liz has been getting on with the sewing-machine 'evening classes' and has started to branch out from throw cushions and test squares. I commissioned a 'bee blanket', a roughly 18 inch square of dense, opaque material which you drop over the hive frames when you go in to examine the hive, and then peel/roll back frame by frame as you work. This saves having to expose all the bees immediately to daylight (and heat-loss) before you need to - you start at the back frame and it takes a few minutes to examine each, so the last frames can stay snug and dark while you work.

We prefer the white variety of Japanese Anenome, though
 these flowers are a bit rain-bashed.

Liz has also decided to give a try to making actual bee-keeper suits with all the zips and all-enclosing shape that they entail, including the wire hoops stiffening the veil and the mesh visor itself. She has sneaked my suit off to one evening class to get the pattern worked out and has today been measuring me in all directions and has gone in armed with all the special cloth (white 'drill') and bits and pieces. Brave girl.

Red Rag...

Red 'rag' to a 'Stag' Turkey? Liz's scarlet pyjamas

Liz got a nasty surprise recently when normally placid, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly, male turkey, 'Tom' decided to attack her. He did the proper rearing up, both feet off the ground, flying kick thing and caught her a couple of quite nasty bruises and abrasions one on each thigh. We'd seen him do plenty of displaying at both of us but only actually seen him square up to our 2nd-in-command rooster, 'Captain', so Liz, who had stepped out into the yard still in her PJs to enjoy the morning sun,  saw him stalk over and thought no more of it. She was taken by surprise when he launched himself and then she nipped indoors a bit quick to slam the door on the rude lad.

Is this the biggest single geranium plant you ever did see?
The variety is 'Orion'. 

We wondered if perhaps the bright red PJs had anything to do with it, and we are now sure that's what was riling him. Turkeys do very red facial displays, with all their fancy excrescences going from dull blue-grey, through bright blue to bright red, so it would be logical for red to be an unwise response. Liz has since tried the same move in all the other colours she wears, to no effect. She then tried the red PJs one more time, out at the front of the house just to test the theory with Tom way away over by the pond. He spotted her and made a bee-line charge across the drive and car port, so that she had to grab a Curver-bucket and plonk it over his head while she retreated backwards indoors. Mad bird (Tom, not Lizzie!). Generally, like most poultry keepers, we would not tolerate an aggressive cock-bird, but we are forgiving Tom for now as we can manage the behaviour by just not wearing bright red PJs out of doors during the breeding season.

In the 'craft' department, Liz has a new weapon in the armoury, a good second hand sewing machine found for her by local expert Carolyn (of the mini horses). Carolyn used to service and demonstrate machines to customers and now runs evening classes for the likes of Liz who is experienced but rusty and would be unfamiliar with these new machines with their fancy electronics and broad choice of stitch-types. Liz has one such class tonight and takes her own machine along to be shown new stuff on.

Carding Lily's first-cut wool

Meanwhile, Carolyn herself has been restoring and exploring an olde spinning wheel, using the fleece we sheared from our ewes, Polly and Lily. This is mainly Lily at the moment (just because she got that first and has put it through the washing stages and has now carded some of it). This turned out to be a bit of a problem because where I had made such a 'Horlicks' of shearing Lily in two halves (outer and inner wool), the wool strands are only half as long as they should be (2 inches instead of about 4) which makes carding easier but spinning is tricky. You have to tease lots of fibres out of the carded mass of wool and feed them onto the spinning wheel without the not-yet-spun strand of wool breaking.

Lily's wool on the spinning wheel. 

The spinning wheel is an old one from (Carloyn thinks) around the 40s and they have had to get it going again with no instructions, just from working out engineering "first principles" with only some explanatory videos on the web (and a helpful expert at the end of an e-mail). They are getting there but suffering from the machine over-spinning the wool so that it knots up and struggling to create knit-able, even wool strands. Nothing if not determined though, this wool is going to get spun and a garment or test square knitted from it "even if (she) then puts the machine away in a cupboard and never touches it again!" It is fascinating to watch the process but we think that maybe Liz has the easier task, mastering the modern electronics of the sewing machine. We all believe that there are no evening classes for this spinning skill for miles around.

Gorgeous lamb's liver paté

In the cookery department, several nice recent successes including 2 new recipes which will become 'keepers' and get filed on our repertoire. Both the new ones are from internet friends, one of whom has made a move a bit like ours, out of a long-term career (Accounting in her case) into a brand new life (professional cook/caterer). She had posted a version of cous-cous salad which sounded interesting mainly because it had no cous-sous in it (!). We like cous cous, but were intrigued by this alternative - cauliflower florets 'whizzed' up raw into tiny crumbs the size of cous-cous bits which you then steam only enough to cook them but so that they keep the nutty, lots-of-bits, mouth-feel of cooked cous-cous. You don't want them turning to veg-mush like overcooked courgette, Yuck. Then of course, you make up your salad with the usual fried/roasted peppers, toms, onions, garlic or what ever you'd normally use in a cous-cous. We were delighted.

We always say soufflé is easier and nicer with your own
good, very fresh, free range eggs. 

The other new-comer was a version of lamb-liver paté using allspice. It was suggested that if you were not an over-keen liver nut, and lamb's liver can be VERY liver-tasting, then this recipe reduced the 'livery-ness' a bit. What ever the truth, this paté was gorgeous, one of the best I have ever tasted. I like my paté a tad 'coarse' (bitty) in texture, so this was only 'blitzed' to a degree, but if you like a smooth paté then there would be no reason why you couldn't do all the fine sieving rigmarole to get the bits out. It would taste just as good. The third notable success was a cracking set of cheese soufflés, always easier and nicer with your own good, very fresh, free range eggs.

Not one to be proud of - probably should get the brake linings
checked before they are stripped bare and down to the metal!

In other news we are getting the car ready for sale (actually part-exchange) and we may have found a replacement but more on this in the next post. We do not want to tempt fate by describing a car and then it all going "Pete Tong" on us. Suffice to say that we could not look a salesman in the eye knowing that the front end of the car was making those metal-on-metal grinding noises (aside from the risk of driving around with rubbish front stopping-power), so the car was off this morning to get shiny new front discs and pads. Yesterday we had to play take off the tow hitch games. We may just buy a car for which the hitch was compatible and the said salesman had already said he'd be perfectly happy for us to excude it from any deal. No-one wants a tow hitch, he assured us.

The baby turkeys at three weeks old - they get to go outside
on warm dry days but get rescued back indoors at night. 

And finally a nice surprise greeted me under the elderberry bush. Regular readers may recall that we had what we thought was a rather hopeless mother Buff Orpington hen go broody under the bush and gave us some hand-wringing times with her fierce determination to stay right there, rather than get moved to somewhere safe and fox-proof. In the end we gave in and created a fox-barrier round her but she seemed to be too bored to be a successful broody. She first evicted one egg and left it, all lonely, outside the nest, never pulling it back under her skirts, and she spent more than an hour off the nest, sometimes two times a day just wandering around. We were sure the eggs would be chilled and lost but today (while she was off again) I checked the eggs and could see one was well into 'pipping', with the little chick's beak clearly visible moving about inside the hole it was making through the shell. Now, we have been in this game too long (even the short time we HAVE been!) to start counting babies when they are only half way out and Mum was quickly back on today. Only she will know what's going on under her skirts but Liz is joking that if she hatches more than "Hen with One Chick" she will be unbearable. We are suitably chastened and humbled by our lack of faith. The 'hopeless broody' has at least brought one to full term.

Of Swarm Lures, Turkeys and Kangaroos

A post of three thirds. I wonder how many bloggers started with a title like that tonight? I like to keep my subject headers a bit 'noticable' so if you are entrigued, read on and enjoy it. Two of these stories are triggered by tip-offs from Anne, but the first is a tribute to ace carpenter K-Dub, who we have met before (16th June and 6th July 2013)

A swarm-lure or 'bait box'. 

Bee keepers seem to spend a good part of their time worrying about their colonies swarming. Swarming is that event in (roughly) May/June when your old established Queen bee ups sticks to set up a new colony with half your workers leaving behind (you hope) a queen cell or two containing pupating replacement (virgin) queens who will take over. It is the honey bee's way of doing that Darwinian thing of increasing in numbers and taking over the world. It has worked very well for them for 30 million years, well before man started 'helping' them. The individual bees breed by normal insect-ish means  but if they did not swarm, then they'd stay in the same hollow tree for ever, so swarming is the way that the colony, hive or 'super-organism' increases in numbers.

I've never had much time for Smithwick's beers, but this 'Blonde'
was OK. Impressively quaffable. 

Bee keepers can try to stop this by a variety of methods but it is a forlorn hope - the urge to breed is hard-wired in and they might as well try to stop their teenage daughters from fancying the local boys, or their dog from chasing that she-dog down the road who is on heat. All they can really do is hope to influence the timing and then work to contain the swarm within their apiary and thereby not lose half the honey-gathering workforce.

Ooops. We seem to have acquired a couple of turkeys.

One such way is to build a 'swarm-lure' or 'bait box'. The idea here is that the swarm 'swarms' out of the hive but then gathers on a handy bush or tree (or bank ATM machine, fence post, car engine bay, sky-scraper) to regroup (around the queen). The swarm then sends off scout bees to look for a more sensible home (hollow tree, chimney etc) and, within a few hours, has a committee meeting, decides on the best location found and zooms off to go and invade it. The beekeeper tries to pre-empt this by providing, in a handy tree, a more attractive new home than any available in nature.

The theory goes that this should be a box of roughly 40 litres capacity (a 15 inch cube or so) about 12 feet off the ground, containing some old hive frames which will smell familiar to the scout bees augmented, some say, with lemon balm scent (which apparently smells nice to bees). People build them out of all manner of scrap wood, planks and boards, rough aul' wood with splits, knots and cracks. Nobody spends any money on them as the hope is, as I said, rather forlorn. The bees have to swarm, and find your box and decide that that is the best accommodation around. Good luck with that.

Charlotte de-crates the hen bird.

I decided to give it a try and knew that the nearest carpenter around who might have a supply of scrap wood, was old chum K-Dub. I made contact and punted my 'scrounge'. K-Dub was happy to oblige. Come down, he said and raid my scrap pile. I scrapped into a notebook a quick drawing of what I'd need based on the required internal dimensions which would suit the bee hive frames.  Well, K-Dub being who he is got all intrigued by the idea and, instead of leaving me to find scrap wood, started offering to cut 'this bit of board' to size on his huge, powerful, bench-saw, then started to assemble it and quickly (less than an hour) built me a superb, luxurious box which knocks anything I have seen into a cocked hat.

The swarm bees (if they happen) will be dazzled! It is glued and screwed, It has a landing ramp outside the entrance hole and handles to lift it by. K-Dub even gave me a tin of old varnish which he'd had on his shelf "for 4 years", that I might paint the box and return the rest of the varnish. That guy is just THE BEST kind of neighbour, friend and carpenter. If I'd taken the wood and done it myself, I'd still be doing it now and there'd be splinters, gaps, jaunty angles and Heaven knows what. The bees may well have used it but this box will feel like the penthouse suite!

The male ('stag' or 'Tom') is not sure whether to come out of his
crate.

And so to turkeys. You may have spotted some pics higher up the post. I have been hankering for turkeys as my next species in 2015 for a while and had mentioned this to Anne. She tipped me off that there was a poultry 'Bring and Buy' at Kiltimagh (in Mayo, our neighbouring county) today. I fancied a couple of young females of the old fashioned 'Bronze' (single breasted) variety and an unrelated male (they are called 'stags' or 'Toms') to use as our parent generation. These guys would not be eaten for Christmas, but any progeny would be fair game (next year). So, with Liz still away, I rounded up Charlotte (who also needed some turkeys for a friend) and we 'went equipped' - money, pet-carriers, early start.

Crates in the car.

Well, Kiltimagh turns out ot be a rather small event with only half a dozen sellers including the petting zoo owner but among these was a lady with a crate in her van containing an immense and impressive 2014 breedable pair of turkeys. The hen was apparently in lay (so Charlotte bought half a dozen fertile eggs for her friend) and the stag/tom/male was strutting his proud stuff with tail up, wings lowered and all his facial extravagance on display. This is all retractable bright blue and red skin and we now know is known as the 'caruncle, snood and wattle'. He was also 'gobble gobble'-ing loudly to protect his woman. He stole my heart. To cut a long story short, we bought the pair and they are now at home in the middle part of the goose house, settling in prior to being allowed out free range (in stages). More pics of these guys in future posts.

Kangaroo steaks.

Finally, our local branch of supermarket Lidl has gone a bit crazy with frozen meats of all sorts of different species - wild boar, ostrich and even kangaroo. Anne had commented that Simon was quite taken with the latter as it was lean and of fine texture without being as gamey as venison. You should always try these things, so I was in Lidl yesterday and picked up some kangaroo. Well, I was impressed. The only serving suggestion on the box seemed to be a rather basic two-side fry, 7 minutes a side which gave it a 'well done' finish, to which I added a 5 minute rest. On reflection you could easily do a rare version. The pic on the box looks quite pink, so I think that must be what they have done for the advert.

I served mine with new potatoes and a mix of roasted veg with Cajun seasoning (courgette, peppers, red onion, tomato, garlic) and washed it down with an Australian Shiraz (homage to the Ozzie-ness of the kangaroo?). I had deliberately not flavoured the meat, except for a bit of salt, because I wanted to taste the base flavour. It worked well though it would be quite pricey at €5.99 for the pack, though possibly intended for two and my only other (piffling) criticism was that the meat was already chopped into 5 small bits, rather than  two decent steaks. Worth a try, then, if your Lidl's are doing it. Thanks for the tip-offs Anne on both Turkeys and Kangaroos.