Sheep feast on swedes while city folk pay $7 a pop – Hunter Wells
They’ll be mercilessly mocking me.
Those Corriedales, flocks of the mean-spirited sods. All over the South Island. No danger of them being sheepish about it.
Because it’s about now they’ll be hooking into winter feed, crops of swede, paddocks and paddocks of them.
Millions of them. And they’ll be munching for nothing.
Chewing sideways as they do, that weird lateral grinding motion, and laughing.
Kind of adds to the insult really.
Because what they enjoy for nothing, I pay the thick end of $7 a kilo – $7 for just one swede at the duopoly, the supermarket on Saturday evening.
I developed a lifelong hankering for swede after being told by a farmer – you know him, “The Hat” – that the thick, heavy, earthy, slightly nutty and not unpleasant stench in the air over the top paddock was something known in the industry as “brassica bum”, or sheep farts.
Then he would mumble and chuckle incomprehensibly, and delightfully, to himself like Paw Rugg from the TV cartoon Hill Billy Bears.
Setting up the city slicker was one of the joys of his day.
And what kept a Corriedale regular was also good for humans, it seemed, and I was dispatched to get a couple of swedes for dinner that night.
“Make sure you pull them from the middle of the paddock,” The Hat told me.
Why? What difference does it make?
“Well, sheep love ‘em and they’ll be p***ed off if they find any missing.”
More Paw Rugg chuckles.
I was left pondering cheated and angry sheep.
It was like the apprentice being sent for a left-handed screwdriver or tartan paint.
That night the swede was boiled to almost tender, pressed through sieve, splashed with cream and a generous knob of butter and seasoned.
“Get it down yuh,” said the Hat. “It’ll do you good.”
Swede had helped shape this fine model of a man for 66 years, so I did as I was told.
And he even took the soggy fag butt from his mouth to eat his portion.
It was at that moment that an enduring union with rutabaga, as the Swedes call swedes, was formed.
So, Saturday night, when others were investing in Lotto, I invested about $7, about a quarter of the hourly “living wage”, in one of those big, rough, golden and purple baubles.
A swede. Do you sense how peeved I am at the cost?
I am now waiting for said swede to assault my olfactory organs like the swede-fuelled Corriedales of mid-Canterbury did.