This afternoon, Mel and I visited the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum on the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa.

"How lucky we are to have a farm we can visit in the middle of the city," Mel said, as we drove to the site on her day off.

We started our visit in the Small Animal Barn, where we met a pair of lambs that had been born just a few hours before. In fact, quite a few ewes had lambs—too many, in fact, to squeeze into my montage of photos. Spring is a perfect time to visit the Farm. The Small Animal Barn also houses a llama named Lincoln, numerous sheep and goats, as well as rabbits and pigs.

Next, we headed to the Demonstration Kitchen, where Meghan The Chef (pictured below in the bottom left) was preparing a clafoutis. This classic French dessert is a lightly sweetened custard with fruit. Meghan was being helped by two children from the small group of us who had settled in the warm kitchen. The older sister did an admirable job of helping her younger sister crack an egg, zest a lemon and stir the clafoutis batter while Meghan slowly added the flour. When the clafoutis was ready to pop in the oven, Meghan said that she had another clafoutis that was just about to come out of the oven. So we stuck around to have a taste of the warm custard tart. We were in no rush, and were enjoying the serenity of the kitchen.

We had time to slip over to the Dairy Barn to visit the cows before the next food demonstration was to start 20 minutes later. In the Dairy Barn, we searched for cows we had met during last year's visit: Sofia, Sage, Star. Then we went to the adjacent room to visit the calves, where Mel was able to get her fill of petting. There we met Meghan The Calf (pictured below in the top left). We would learn later that the calf was named after Meghan The Chef. Pudding sat serenely just out of reach; Zena was more curious, even though she was just five days old. And sitting alone in his own pen was a beautiful black calf who did not appear to have a name. Mel thought he looked like a Gerald, and I dubbed him Forge.

We made our way back to the Demonstration Kitchen, where Meghan had just begun an explanation of how chocolate is transformed from bean to bar. In all my studies of food, I had never learned how chocolate is made, so this hands-on demonstration plus taste-testing was perfect. Meghan told us of the numerous steps involved in producing chocolate, and, later, I refreshed my memory through a BBC Science Focus article on the subject.

After describing the various stages of the chocolate process (pictured below in the middle left), Meghan treated us to a taste test of chocolates. She invited us to reflect on the flavours occurring naturally in the dark chocolate. The first chocolate (Hispaniola by Hummingbird Chocolate in Almonte) had notes of coffee, Mel thought. The second (Zorzal, also by Hummingbird) had hints of raisin, I suggested. The third—a white chocolate from Lindt—seemed overly sweet after the bittersweet bite of the dark chocolate.

While I could have talked to Meghan all day and would have loved to have viewed the temporary exhibit Ecuador: The Origins of Cacao, Mel and I had one more stop on our itinerary: a visit to the rabbits in the Horse and Cattle Barn. Coincidentally, the person leading that hands-on activity was named Coco (pictured below in the top middle). Coco brought out a Flemish Giant rabbit named Cumberland (pictured below in the top middle and right). Though the Museum has other breeds of rabbits, she said, the Flemish Giant is a good representation of the type of rabbit a farm might keep if raising rabbits for meat.

After almost three hours at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, Mel and I left with smiles on our faces. We had spent a peaceful afternoon on the Farm, exploring food and fuzzy friends.