How does this take your fancy? You wanted something different. Can't get more so than this.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... xhome.html
I'll have a badger with flies please
By Elizabeth Day
(Filed: 12/02/2006)
Arthur Boyt is a dog-lover. He loves to watch them bounding through fields, fetching sticks and barking with glee. He loves their moist noses, their wagging tails and their glossy coats. But he is particularly partial to them diced and boiled for an hour in a pressure cooker.
"Labrador is rather special," he says, smacking his lips. "It has a pleasant taste and flavour that is a bit like lamb. It turns people off when I say that Labrador is my favourite thing to eat but the point is, I would never kill an animal."
But Mr Boyt is not a wasteful fellow by inclination. So when he sees dead animals on the side of the road, what could be more natural than to sling the carcass into the boot of his battered grey Citroen and chop it up into a tasty casserole? Because Mr Boyt, 66, enjoys a rather unusual past-time: he is a roadkill chef. "I don't believe in waste," he says, staring earnestly through oversize aviator-style spectacles. "I'm a 'freegan'. I try to eat all my meals for free."
His specialities, thrown together on a rickety wooden table in his cramped farmhouse kitchen in Davidstow, Cornwall, include assorted casseroles featuring foxes, Canada geese, barn owls, hedgehogs, badgers, voles, squirrels, rats, blackbirds, cats and dogs.
Once, on what he thought was a particularly lucky day, he found a swan. "Tasted like mud," he says, waving his hand dismissively.
Mr Boyt, a retired entomologist, has been eating road-kill since he was 15 when he discovered a dead pheasant while on a bicycle ride through Windsor Great Park. The young Arthur took it home to Watford, Hertfordshire, where his enterprising mother cooked it for supper.
Now he intends to put his accumulated knowledge into a book and is searching for a publisher. "People regard me as an eccentric," he says, "but that doesn't bother me. I think other people simply have very plain lives."
In a moment of sheer folly last week, I accepted an invitation to join Mr Boyt for a meal. I am pondering my many misgivings as we speed across the vast, flat expanse of Bodmin Moor talking about dead pets. Of course, this type of cookery requires a very different approach to grocery shopping. Not for Mr Boyt the soulless strip-lighting of the local supermarket. Instead, he hits the road in the hope that an articulated truck has hit his supper.
We swerve through the kind of fog that provides perfect cover for axe murderers and fugitives from the law, and the dashboard thermometer drops to -1C. Isn't this extreme grocery shopping rather dangerous? "Well, generally the most desirable road-kill ends up at the side of the road," he says matter-of-factly. "Those in the middle tend to have been scrunched."
About half an hour into our foraging expedition, we find the main course. There, on the side of a busy road, is a prone pheasant. Mr Boyt's eyes light up. He rushes out of the car, half-running, half-tiptoeing in a pair of leisure sandals worn without socks despite the sub-zero temperatures and bracing wind. "Not too much damage," he shouts above the noise of the passing traffic. "I think it's been hit in the neck and one of its legs has broken, but it will be easy to skin."
The pheasant is picked up by its feet, stuffed into a Laura Ashley carrier bag and deposited in the back. "I try not to swing it around too much in case the blood splatters. My wife doesn't like that. The problem is, sometimes I use her car and forget that I've left a badger in it."
Fortuitously, Mrs Boyt is away for a few weeks. She is a vegetarian and, despite having had 10 years of marriage to get used to it, does not really like this sort of thing. "When I first met Sue, I offered to drive her to an orienteering event," says Mr Boyt. "I remember jamming on my brakes for a dead pheasant and her expressing slight concern. When I eat road-kill, she tends to take her food upstairs so as to avoid a row."
The couple have no children, but own two tortoiseshell cats. One of them, somewhat disturbingly given Mr Boyt's predilections, is called Pie. If Pie were to be run over, would Mr Boyt make a Pie pie? "No, the wife wouldn't like it," he says. "I have eaten pets and that upsets most people so I doubt if I'd ever do it again. I confess that if I found a dog, though…" his forehead wrinkles in contemplation. "What would I do? Well, I might be tempted. But if it has a name on it, then I will go to the ends of the earth to reunite the pet with its owners."
There are no domestic pet fatalities to test Mr Boyt's conscience during our expedition. I am relieved. I don't mind eating a bit of pheasant, but I draw the line at cats. "It's meat," Mr Boyt says, hunched over the steering-wheel in his bobble hat with "Devon Orienteering Club" across the front. "This animal has died and will be eaten by maggots or thrown into the bin. That's a terrible waste and sacrifice of an animal's life. The most noble thing you can do is to give that animal a use."
In a small country lane, we spot a barn owl crying out to be put to use. Not literally, of course - it's dead. "My word," Mr Boyt says. "I shall skin that and enjoy a spot of owl breast later."
Back at the Boyts' farmhouse at the edge of a disused 1940s airfield, we set about preparing supper. Three sinister-looking pots are already bubbling away on the Aga, emitting a strange, metallic smell.
A surprisingly normal-looking Mrs Boyt smiles broadly out of a photo on a nearby wall, in ignorant bliss of the fact that her husband is decapitating a pheasant. Mr Boyt rips the bird apart with his bare hands and saws a rusty scalpel through bits of cartilage. It is not for the faint-hearted. The resulting pheasant stew (potatoes, carrots, shepherd's pie sauce swiped from a supermarket skip) is, however, perfectly palatable.
But this is swiftly followed by a badger casserole that Mr Boyt thoughtfully made before my arrival, in the manner of a slightly deranged "Here's one I prepared earlier" Blue Peter presenter. "There," he says proudly, ladling a badger's skull from a bubbling pot of viscous brown goo. "See what you think of that."
I slice off a morsel that is barely visible to the naked eye. It smells of damp dog hair. I swallow it, trying not to inhale. It tastes like a cross between lamb and corned beef. "Mmmm," I manage, not entirely convincingly. Unbelievably, there is no gag reflex. But just as I congratulate myself on my iron stomach, Mr Boyt plucks a stewed eyeball out of the badger's skull with his fork, pops it nonchalantly into his mouth and starts chewing happily. Gulp. I don't think I'll be asking for seconds.
21 Feb 2006, 12:35 pm
Or chocolate mousse.. And if you don't like either just make them and send 'em my way 
