Rooster. Very delicious rooster at that.

 We bought a very cheap and very lean bird.  It looked like one of those incredible jobs.  It was the sort of bird we don’t get in Dubai and certainly not in NZ. Was it a chicken? No.  A Guinea fowl? No.  A partridge or whatever? No.

It was only upon deconstructing this winged creature that I realised.  The bones big.  The skin had very very little fat.  The meat on the legs dark.  The tendons fierce (I did manage to cut off most tendons as effectively as I could.) This winged creature, we discovered, was in fact a rooster 

Strange maybe but we'd never happened upon a rooster.  

We made a pea puree.  We cooked celeriac in the fat from the skin and crispy cooked extra skin taken from the carcass. We made a sauce from the carcass. The sauce was left in Andy’s deft hands.  Bones cooked down with the usuals of wine and aromatics.  Balanced with salt, sweet, acidity at the end.  Utterly scrummerly.  The extra coq skin was oven baked until crunchy.  The celeriac pave was cooked in the coq fat until meltingly tender. 

The bird was 3euro.  And by god it was tasty. 

I love the satisfaction that comes from boning joints.  To do this with a cheap male rooster was so damn awesome.

 Yeap.  A little beaut of a bird.   And all for $5NZ.  I also have, in my fridge even more leftover bones to cook additional stock and make another gorgeous meal.