I goat you a gift...

This one is for TJ and RC...

I've told this story a number of times now and thought it so amusing that I've decided to share it with the world...

While at a New Year's Day breakfast, I was talking with one of my oldest and dearest friends, RC about Christmas and what Santa brought us. RC's husband is a GP and often gets showered with gifts all year long from his grateful patients who are mainly old aged ethnic pensioners - those cute little old nonni that seem sweet but would put out a hit on you so fast if you messed with their families you'd be in concrete shoes before you could blink - you know the ones. He especially gets inundated at Christmas - I often think of the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, where Atticus gets paid in potatoes and collard greens and imagine RC surrounded by bushels of whatever is growing locally in little old ladies' gardens that season. But she seemed particularly excited by one gift and so goes the exchange:

RC: We got a goat.

PB (that's me): Oh! I got a goat too! My friend TJ got me a goat through Oxfam. What a great idea - that's what we ended up buying for all our family overseas - we bought sewing lessons in Africa and a carpentry workshop and a business start-up...

I stopped speaking when I noticed my friend's expression as I was blathering on about Oxfam and goats and chickens...

RC: No, you don't understand - we got a goat.

And then I understood. We weren't talking Oxfam, we were talking carcasses.

RC then went on to describe the phone-call from her husband and the subsequent panic as she had to drive to his surgery to collect said goat. Like Laura Palmer, the goat (mercifully headless but otherwise intact) was wrapped in plastic. Luckily, she has a spare refrigerator (one of those half-fridge, half freezer jobs, I think) which she cleared out by taking out the shelves and found she had to shove the cadaver in vertically as it would not fit in any other way. While all the time shrieking "eeeuuuwww....eeeuuuwww..." as you would.

Now to most people, being on the receiving end of a goat would be an interesting space to be in. What the hell do you do with a whole goat? I don't even own a knife that would cut butter effectively let alone a cleaver that could do some damage to a real animal. My butchering skills lie on about a par with being able to tell the chicken thigh from a breast but even then sometimes those damned plump thighs will have me looking twice (damned hormone-injected chickens and their fat thighed ways!).

So what did RC do? What any self-respecting Italian girl does on receipt of a goat - she calls her dad.

[If my Dad were still alive, and I had made that phone-call, "Dad, someone gave me a fresh goat" - it would be news on a par with Italy winning the World Cup (AGAIN!) or them finally acknowledging that William Shakespeare was Italian after all (my father believed that anything good in this world naturally is of Italian origin).]

RC's dad sets a land-speed record for getting to her house and all is well. He has a wood-fired oven, people - this man knows what to do with a goat.

So all's well that ends well.

Now I'm hankering for a little marinated capretto....mmmmm...