No, not rubber ducks and sorry I haven’t much time, my dinners nearly ready, so this won’t be a long one.These are the ducks that I’m talking about, Holly’s ducks, those little fluffy ducklings I blogged about just a few months ago. Haven’t they grown - Just look at the size of the big white one, Huey, we call him. He looks more like a goose than a duck. He looks just like the illustration of the Goosey-Goosey-Gander goose in the nursery rhyme book I used to read to Holly when she was little.
“Goosey-Goosey-Gander, whither do you wander, upstairs, downstairs, in my ladies chamber. There I found an old man who wouldn’t say his prayers, so I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs….”
Huey seemed to grow at twice the rate of the other two, Louey and Dewey, I wonder why that should be? Perhaps he was a bigger egg as a duckling, or perhaps he was just a bit of a bully, taking more than his fair share of the duck meal, bread, and scraps of cakes and biscuits we feed to them.
Yes, he grew the quickest and he is the biggest, so perhaps if he was the greediest it serves him right.
Anyway, tea’s nearly ready. I’m looking forward to it. The aroma coming from the oven smells delicious. It reminds me a little of the last lines of that rhyme. They’re usually left out of the text but not in Holly’s book and I always read them to her, perhaps it explains her ‘realistic’ approach to livestock - “The stairs went ‘crack’, he broke his back, and all the little ducks went “quack, quack, quack.”
Quack, quack, quack.
Andrew Bickerdike messaged on Facebook:
ReplyDelete"was the future 'Orange' for those ducks?"
I remember pa's gamekeeper killig ducks. He used to put his knife through the top of their heads he said it was less painful that breaking their necks. I love roast duck.
ReplyDeleteSimple roast duck recipe.
ReplyDeleteIngredients
1 duck
1 clove garlic minced
Salt
Pepper
Half an apple sliced
Quarter of a large onion chopped
1 chopped celery stalk tops
two slices of bacon
Butter 1 oz
Sprinkle bird with pepper, salt and garlic both inside and out. Place apple, onion, and celery in the cavity of each bird. Place bacon slices on the breast of bird. Place bird in roasting pan, breast side up with a little water in the bottom of the pan. Cover with tinfoil and place in preheated oven at 300. The size of the bird will dictate how long to cook but large ducks generally take at least 1.5 hours. Baste the birds with melted butter every 20 minutes. Remove the foil 20 minutes before serving and sprinkle liberally with salt to brown bird if desired.
don't we read terribly violent stuff to impressionable children?!
ReplyDelete