Of Ducks and Men...

Recently 'Facebook' Fereday has been expressing his delight with his culinary efforts, namely his confit duck... and it truly was a triumph – absolutely delicious.... to borrow a Winner-ism, it was 'historic'.However, there's more to the tale of this bird than just the eating....One of my favourite Philosophy professors has a few well-used phrases.... "Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck,... must be a duck....." was one of them (another was to describe something as being like a 'Lead Zeppelin' by which he meant that something wasn't practical rather than it being like an aging rock band... his own equivalent of the 'chocolate teapot' if you like.)Anyway, for the purpose of recounting the duck story, I'm pilfering the phrase and twisting it about a bit (I'd nick the 'Lead Zeppelin', but I think I'm a bit too young to carry it off convincingly.... and, worse, my audience is likely to be way too young to get a reference to anything pre-Bananarama / Duran Duran). So, here's my version...."On the duck shelf in Sainsbury's, above the duck price tag .... must be a duck....."Yep, Fereday and I rummaged the shelves to select the largest duck we could find (thereby taking advantage of the 50% duck discount)... we stopped and selected the duck fat for the comfit..... we checked the prices of frozen duck (which came with giblets – yucko).... we checked out at the supermarket.... we unloaded at home..... we put the duck in the freezer..... There were several points where we congratulated ourselves on being such clever shoppers to buy a whole duck rather than a packet of duck breasts and a packet of duck legs..... I'm sure at one point I was stood in the kitchen brandishing the 'duck' extolling the virtues of having enough sense to quarter it rather than wasting money on 'buying separates' just before putting it into the freezer.....Only for Fereday to open the freezer a week later to be greeted by .... A CHICKEN!!!! So.... "On the duck shelf in Sainsbury's, above the duck price tag .... should be a duck..... but is in fact a chicken just filling up empty shelf-space." AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaarghhhhhhhh!Anyway, Fereday hustled down to Sainsbury's and got a real duck that morning... the confit was an unmitigated success and, I have to say,... a duck really looks nothing like a chicken......But the 'duck drama' doesn't end there. A bit later, having one of those 'married people' conversations.... 'what do you fancy for dinner'.... 'what do we have'.... etc, etc. We decided on sausage and mash.... and duly removed sausages and tub of homemade mash from freezer...... Only.... it wasn't mash was it.... the duck had struck again.... there's now a tub of duck fat in the freezer on which Fereday has written in large letters 'NOT MASH'....... he tells me that he's used a whiteboard marker.... so, no doubt, I'll be facing mash potato Russian Roulette again soon..... still, nice to know there's a bit of excitement on the horizon.....

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