
Just a very quick note to mention a grand day’s shooting yesterday in Aberdeenshire in a fiercely cold wind. I shot miserably, and after many years of white-hot anticipation, perhaps it was inevitable that I abjectly failed in my first “toe-to-toe” sporting engagement with a blackcock. Much more on this momentous, stomach-churning moment to come, but suffice to say for now that I have returned home with a game bag full of white hares, which I hold in extremely high esteem in the kitchen.
I’d love to know why the Europeans value hare meat so much more than we do, but it always seems that the majority of our mountain hares are shipped abroad by game dealers. I was thrilled to come down the A90 with a couple of cracking big young hares last night, and I look forward to getting them in the oven.
Now that I am such a pretentious gastronome, the sky is the limit for what I might end up trying.