Hello Dear Reader,
I try my very best to only eat British meat. We have welfare standards that we can be rightly proud of however, I don't often eat free range. With the exception of eggs and chicken, I can't guarantee that my food wasn't fattened indoors or lived its life indoors.
Our local butcher sells venison (deer) and it spends all its life outside. It's local, free range and affordable at £7 a kilo. To put that into perspective, a free range chicken in our butchers is £7.50 and we can get four large portions of meat and then chicken soup from the stock (bones) after that. We eat less and less meat and try to eat better quality.
It was great to be able to buy venison burgers, which were on offer as a BOGOF so we stocked the freezer with ten packs to eat over the coming year. It's a delicious meat with hardly any fat. My advice would be to use venison where ever you might use beef: in your Sunday roast, in casserole, as mince for cottage pie or in this case for burgers. We even eat it with horseradish sauce.
The potatoes were from dad's garden, the beans are imported and the coleslaw is from Aldi. Our four venison burgers cost £1.50 for four (BOGOF deal) and we have plenty more of them at that brilliant price to eat another day. I'm sure hunters who shoot their own meat will agree that it's an amazingly tender and versatile meat. I've only ever eaten farmed venison but have been told that the wild deer has a stronger flavour but is incredibly good.
Over to you Dear Reader, who else tries a cheaper alternative? Who has found a cheap alternative? Anyone else found how reasonably priced venison can be? Our local butcher also sells whole prepared local rabbits for £3 each and they might be my alternative to eating chicken which is becoming increasingly expensive!
As ever, I look forward to hearing from you.
Love Froogs xxxxx