My brother, Chase, and I dropped by JoAnn the Chicken Lady’s farm last weekend. We were picking up a bird for me to kill, clean, pluck and eat for a photo essay Chase is working on for school. After she picked us out a nice Cornish bird, we started talking about what kinds of ducks to serve at Union. She’s been raising five breeds for the past few years and knows a few things about their characters—and not just how Muscovies, with their darker flesh, are more goosey than Pekin ducks. She has found that they tend to be a bit dumber, too, and a little more vicious with their claws. As she puts it, they are “just not as pleasant company.” Some types of Pekin ducks are like broiler chickens: “Eating machines,” she says. “It’s sad when you get to know them—you can just pick them up and toss them about like turnips.”

JoAnn wants to offer me Silver Appleyard ducks. They sound like they are going to taste really good. They were bred way back when, by an Englishman named Reginald Appleyard who wanted a good eating duck that could also lay a few eggs. JoAnn wants to build the breeding stock back up to the quality of Appleyard’s “old fashioned” birds—that is, to a commercial level, but without having all the survival skills bred out of them.

The lesson here is that by keeping the integrity of the birds’ genes intact, their survival skills, like foraging for food, make for a more balanced bird that has a richer, cleaner flavour. Basically, good genes make for good meat because the ducks can fend off disease on their own without being stuffed with antibiotics. You could say JoAnn is raising and breeding ducks to taste how they used to taste. I am looking forward to serving these sweet, plump, tasty ducks at Union. So when I write about giving Union windows, this is what I mean: cutting away the crap and building relationships with people like JoAnn so that Union, like a good, strong tree, can grow from the core.

The Cornish chicken Chase and I took back to the farm was a beautiful, tasty bird, and the photo essay was a success, too. When the professor asked Chase if this shot was staged, he told him, “No, it’s not staged. My brother just thinks his life is one long Bob Dylan song.”

The way I see it, I am only as good as my last dinner. Thesedays, however, as I wait for Union to open, I guess I am only as good as mylast blog post. So here goes: I cooked the first farmers’ dinner last Sundayup at the farm, and it was one of the best dinners I have ever made. There issomething special about cooking food for the people who raise and grow theingredients. This was a five-course meal cooked on the wood-burning stovewith everybody sitting around the kitchen table.

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While Union is being pieced together, I’ve been taking apart whole lambs and pigs at Cumbrae’s. I go in on Wednesdays because it’s the day they get the bodies in—that’s what they call the animals there, “bodies.” I’ve been working mostly on the lambs, which is more intense than cleaning chickens and rabbits and beef tenderloins. The atmosphere in the shop is great—full of happy, patient butchers who don’t mind taking a bit of time to show me how it’s done. The art of butchering is all about knowing where to stick the knife, and then slicing with force and conviction in order to make good, clean, straight cuts. When the knife hits bone, you take the saw and cut right through with long, strong strokes. It takes a while to get a feel for it, or you over-think and the lamb takes you apart instead (and drinking whisky the night before doesn’t help much, either).

But I tell you, there are some beautiful bodies coming into that shop. Last Wednesday, a big Angus came in. Stephen took apart the forequarter (where the prime rib lives) as it was suspended from a swivel hook. The hanging method lets gravity help; the pieces come apart when you find their seams. Stephen makes it look easy. An incision here, a cut there. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. For me, the best part is finally seeing where all the cuts come from—like the bavette, the hanger and the New York. I saw the tenderloin nestled in there, clinging to white fat, and watched the technique used to take it out. I finally understood why every tenderloin I’ve cleaned up has had ridges along its back. They sent me off with a piece of super-aged prime rib to try. I cooked it up at the farm, and the flavour in the aged fat and meat shot my dad back 50 years, to when my grandmother insisted that the butcher hang her stuff as long as he possibly could. I can’t wait to get back in there.

• Watch a video on the dry-aging process (and a number of other meat-related subjects) on Cumbrae’s TV.