One Less Drake

The deed was done and Frogpond now has one less drake.  We spent several hours in the morning reading up again on how best to slaughter a duck.  Bruce sharpened his ax, we  put on a large pot of water in the garage and set up everything else needed to do the butchering.  I decided not to watch the actual killing and turned around and plugged my ears for good measure.  When Bruce gave the all clear, I turned around and was confronted by a dead duck hanging headfirst from the tree and a husband well-soaked in bright red blood.  No pix of this (you're welcome!).  The hose was right there, so we did clean-up.

Bruce spent the next few hours in the garage, plucking duck feathers.  Mama had come up for the night and she ended up joining him to help with this.  I went inside to correct papers -- it was impossible for me to see this bird as meat and not the body of one of my ducks.  Now that it's plucked, cleaned and resting all naked in a pan in the fridge, I can more easily view it as something for the table.  It's sobering to have to confront that something like this happens to every chicken we ever buy at the grocery store.  I take some comfort in knowing that our drake had about as fine a life as a duck could have and it's death was swift.  But I'll admit that I had bad dreams last night of trying to rescue my animals -- the last dream ended with clasping a duck to my chest with one arm and a very large sweet lizard in the other... I woke up feeling sad.

Anyway, I'm going to see this experiment through to the very end.  I just Googled "Muscovy Duck Recipes" and printed out several that look promising. Tonight we dine on Roast Muscovy Duck.

To be continued...




Goat Skull