A brief post on the theme of chickens again. We went to Tesco tonight for our weekly shop. I am happy to report that we were able to buy free range chicken breast portions (or organic), as well as thighs. Got free range eggs - but have been buying those for years. By a quirk, their egg producer is only about 2 miles down the road, on the Wentloog levels, so is also incredibly local. Hellmann's mayonnaise has now also gone Free Range, which is excellent ( I resisted the obvious pun there - sorry, so easy to talk about cracking jokes, groan......) There has also been an noticeably steady improvement in the availability of outdoor reared British pork and bacon over the last couple of years, and we always buy this if we can. I am less convinced of the need for strictly organic production, particularly at the high price differential but would welcome views on this. We do buy some, principally yoghurt (Rachel's Dairy, and Yeo Valley), butter (when Andy doesn't pinch it) and some other dairy products but that is unashamedly on the basis of flavour, rather than any perceived environmental benefit. Some chocolate also would fall into this category such as Green and Black's - I use their cocoa powder for cooking. Again, similar reasoning for some fairtrade sugars and a few organic flours - we love the Dove's Farms ones which we use regularly in the breadmaker. Approximately 80% of our bread consumption is now home-made, and the other 20% is shop bought mainly because I haven't got my act together and occasionally forget to set the machine in the evenings. Also, I would always buy specialist baked goods such as bagels - life is really too short to make these, as they are both boiled and baked. Current favourite mix in the breadmaker is 70% strong white, 15% rye flour and 15% white with seeds (countrygrain) - this makes a beautifully textured, nutty flavoured loaf without that plutonium like density that all rye breads can often achieve. Fellow Pratchett readers will be familiar with dwarf bread - well, rye flour is definately one of the key ingredients along with a little gravel for lightness.

Anyway, the point of all this rambling is that Tesco do seem to be responding to customer demand and stocking meat that is produced humanely - and for that they should be congratulated.

Quick update on the wounded warrior - he is licking his paw a lot, but seems to be recovering. When we got back from Tesco, I took some of the bathroom purchases upstairs, to find that he had been playing with his friend the oven glove, which had been placed lovingly on our bed. He then supervised the unpacking of the carrier bag of goodies, and decided to have a recreational gnaw on some of the contents. My new anti-perspirant now has some rather fetching teeth marks in it.