I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

As is traditional for me, the breaking of the Lenten fast returns you to your regularly scheduled program of charcuterie, offal and dairy products. Usually, we meet friends somewhere for some sort of large-scale indulgence - one year it was half a barbecued pig, another year it was a large-format feast at Resto where we chose the lamb, and so on.

This year, we decided to invite over our usual partners in crime, food-blogger Kathryn McGowan of Comestibles, and her husband Matthew. The plan was that I'd go crazy with the flesh, and they'd provide the wine.

I wanted to do a lot of small plates and fussy food, mostly because I could - and could make use of some of my favorite ingredients. The menu is heavy on dairy, offal and venison, although pork will not be neglected - after all, I've got head-cheese left, and I won some bacon in fencing tournament a week or so ago. I'm also tossing in a bit of fish. Why the hell not?

The menu:

1. braised venison tartlette with smoked paprika crème fraîche
2. tilapia ceviche
3. pork terrine and headcheese, both already elaborated on in these pages, a commercial Portuguese sausage and cornichons with bread
4. gallette of home-cured and smoked bacon and fresh home-made cheese
5. offal and bacon en brochette, featuring bunny liver, kidney and heart, goat heart, and chicken liver with a bit more prize bacon
6. headcheese jus mousse with garlic scapes
7. broiled goat chops with sorrel chimichurri and brussels sprout slaw
8. a cheese plate with some Brie-style goat cheese from the farmer's market and three kinds of homemade cheese: a hard salt-rind style, a softer brined rind style, and a feta style. Sardine toast.
9. leek and portobello mushroom sops (mostly medieval no less). Duck confit and wild mushroom crepes, with asparagus.
10. kale soup

On the other hand, several of the dishes turned out very well indeed. So we shall start with

Goat Chops with Sorrel Chimichurri

• 2 goat chops per person
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil, a neutral oil is best
• half an onion, chopped
• 8 or 9 juniper berries, crushed

If you would rather grill the chops, it should work just as well - be careful, they are tiny little things and easy to over cook. If you can't get goat chops, lamb loin chops would be a good substitute. The goat is well worth getting if you can, though.

Sorrel Chimichurri

This is a medievally inspired recipe, actually. A lot of 14th and 15th century recipe collections include recipes for a sorrel sauce, usually sharpened with verjuice and intended for fish. I modified it into a chimichurri, using sorrel in place of parsley.

• a small handful of sorrel
• 1/2 cup of olive oil
• 1/8 cup red wine vinegar
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 tsp of red pepper flakes
• 2 good pinches of salt

I served this with a brusells sprout slaw. The recipe is the same as the one I use for regular slaw, only with shredded brussels sprouts as the main ingredient rather than cabbage.