As owners of Great Danes and other hounds, my husband, Joe, and I have had many a dog’s head in our own plates and, a bit embarrassingly, that of our guests.  We joke about our “horses,” but neither of us have ever really experienced a horse’s head in our plate…until yesterday.

My dear friend, Maggie Test, recently purchased a gorgeous eight year old gelding named Rocky.  He boards at a lovely barn tucked into the woods in the back of nowhere in a quasi-rural section of VA Beach.  There he lives in horse heaven with 5 other lucky equines.

I’ve been wanting to meet him and have needed to test some recipes for a potential project, so Maggie and I decided to have a picnic lunch yesterday at the barn.  When she asked if I wanted to dine in the barn or at the picnic table, I chose the latter–it was a beautiful, mild summer day–asking if Rocky, grazing nearby, would be interested in our food.

Her response was that she didn’t think so but that, if he was, he would just sniff.  No sooner had we sat down than he walked right over and stuck his humungous head in my plate.  But, indeed, he just sniffed–all over the table–finally deciding on a nice fluffy mound of cilantro.  It was a little unsettling, but utterly delightful.

And the beauty of a true horse head in your plate, as opposed to that of a horse-like dog, is that a horse doesn’t drool!  His beautiful face was quite dry and, all in all, he exhibited rather remarkable etiquette.

I’ll share my lunch with this magnificent vegan beast any time!

Note: We weren’t fast enough to snap a photo of him caught in the act and this photo doesn’t really do him justice, but you get the idea.  And, by the way, the rather odd looking food in the gratin dish was DELICIOUS eggplant and portabella enchiladas with sundried tomato sauce absent their garnish.