Venison, anyone?

"Allow about three hours," George said, explaining why he wouldn't be coming, "and use a five-gallon bucket to catch the guts."

That was the sum total of the good advice I'd been given when I went to work on my roadkill deer. Sadly, I'd also been given a couple of pieces of bad advice (not from George), including 'don't bleed it', 'don't gut it yet' and 'cross the hind legs to hang it, like a rabbit'. As it turns out deer are best bled and gutted as soon as possible to stop the flavours getting too strong, and crossing the legs is a poor idea because then you can't get good access to the belly.

Here isn't the best place to go into the actual process (and I'm not going to make Fergus Drennan's mistake of posting grisly images of half-skinned animals). Suffice it to say that eviscerating a deer (technically gralloching, not paunching as I mistakenly said this morning) turns out to be a bit easier than doing a chicken; more room to see what you're doing - a boon to a sausage-fingered dolt like me. And George was right about the bucket.

So most of the beast is bound for the freezer, wrapped in butcher's paper and bagged (ah you see, not so terribly post-carbon really, am I?). I cut some medallions off one of the loins for tonight's meal though - and the fish chowder I had planned can wait for another day. The medallions were cut just under an inch thick and pan-fried in butter, and when they were done I threw in a glass of red wine, a couple of spoonfuls of sloe gin jelly and a shot of Crème de Cacao Brown, and reduced it until it resembled gravy. This was served with steamed carrots, fresh from the polytunnel, and celeriac mash (which uses about one-third celeriac and two-thirds potato, so that you get the celeriac's aromatic note while keeping the creaminess of the spuds). And the venison, by the way, was excellent.

So to my beloved wife, who was waiting for me to bottle out - 'Told you so!'