also good with Parrot

Hmmm Ostrich eh? Why not? I mean we eat Emu don't we?

/end of train of thought

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I guarantee nobody will ever find my blog by googling the above sentence. So anyways I was eating Peking duck for dinner the other night and (oh by the way this is gonna be a long train of thought post which should end with a story about an ancient Roman gourmet and a restaurant I once owned) I was contemplating how duck has become so popular over the past years. It used to only be chicken but these days people are just as cool eating the dark bird. Personally I love duck, so many ways to cook it, so good.So I started to wonder what would be the next big thing in "birds for dinner", as you do. It was then that I remembered a recipe I once saw for cooking Flamingo - :pause: - yeah I said Flamingo, I know you're probably screwing your nose up right now but when did we start being so fussy with the animals we eat? People in the past have eaten swans, ostrich, cranes and even peacocks. Okay I'm probably just talking about ancient Romans and the like here but eat them they did.I found the Flamingo recipe in a cookbook I own called Apicius. It's one of the oldest known cookbooks around. Supposedly written by a dude called Marcus Gavius Apicius (natch he has a wikipedia page) who was a Roman gourmet and wealthy lover of all things luxurious. He lived in Rome under the reign of Tiberius and was famous for his banquets and flamboyant lifestyle. I'm assuming he was a fat bastard. One day he realised that he was almost broke and decided that rather than die poor he would kill himself. If he couldn't live like he was accustomed to then he'd throw one last banquet and eat some poisoned food at the end of it...so he did, or at least so the legend says.Somewhere along the way he is said to have written down his recipes for others to use and thus we have Apicius the cook book. The thing about this cook book is that there are no measurements, purely ingredients. The thinking behind this was that old Marcus didn't want the common folk to cook his dishes, so if you wanted the amounts you had to ask him and therefor you had to know him. An odd way to operate but hey it was Rome in its' heyday.Which brings me to my restaurant. When I decide to branch out on my own I was always going to call it Apicius, not that I was really going to do any of the dishes in the book, I just wanted to pay homage to this story. It was fairly successful as a business but after 2 years of slog I decided to move on and I sold it to two of my staff who kept it going for 2-3 years more and they made an even bigger success of it all. The building is still there in Fremantle but the restaurants it now houses change names every second week or so it seems.