Recipes
Each month we'll add a new seasonal recipe using the ingredients we produce on the farm.
Roast leg or shoulder of lamb
My favourite dish of all time – roasted fabulous meat is about as good as it gets. Simple. Take your whole leg or shoulder. Generously spoon French mustard over the joint, covering the skin, fat and flesh (use smooth Dijon or the more grainy mustards as you prefer). Then trickle over either runny honey or maple syrup. In your fave roasting pan sit the joint on a tablespoon of flour and stick it in the oven. For the first hour cover with foil, so the honey/syrup doesn’t burn. Then remove the foil and let it brown up. Depending on how pink you like your meat, roast in total for 1 ½ to 1 ¾ hours. Serve with baked spuds, carrots and parsnips par-boiled and then roasted round the meat, and red cabbage casserole (recipe below). Gravy is simple – put the joint on a hot dish for serving, pour off any excess fat from the roasting pan, and use the water saved from par-boiling the carrots and parsnips to pour over the meat juices and flour. Keep stirring over the heat til the right consistency. Season and you are done.
Red Cabbage Casserole:
A deep purple hot veg dish, a perfect partner for fattier meats. This is amazing from frozen, so I make a buckets of it (3 large cabbages or armfuls of small ones), anoint it with alcohol and any Blenheim Orange or Bramley apples from the orchard, and freeze in portion sized bags to be reheated on demand. For modest quantity that will still serve at least six people you need:
1lb of apples – dessert or culinary as you prefer
3 oz demarara sugar
Big handful of sultanas
Red wine dregs – a glass or three
Red wine or cider vinegar - a sploosh
Slice the red cabbage thinly and remove the hard core. Push the cabbage into a lidded casserole. Peel, core and chunk the apples and put with the cabbage. Scatter over the sugar and the sultanas. Pour in the wine and a couple of tablespoons of wine vinegar. Bung on the lid, bring to a simmer on the stove and then stick in the oven. A good two hours in a medium oven should do it. It tastes great fresh, but the flavour deepens the next day or from frozen. Serve it hot with lamb, pork, goose or duck (probably not all at the same time). Some folks add onion, but I think that's a mistake.
Succulent sweet roasted Berkshire gammon:
One joint of gammon, around 2 kilos or 4.5 lbs
a handful of carrots chopped roughly into chunks
a couple of small onions, ditto
half a celery, ditto
a handful of fresh thyme
runny honey, maple syrup or muscovado sugar
your favourite mustard (Moutarde a L'Ancienne, Dijon etc)
Plonk your joint into a big pan or casserole, cover with water and bring to the boil. Drain off the water, cover again with fresh water, bring back to the boil, scoop off any scum and then add the carrots, onion and celery and the thyme. Either simmer on the stove or in the oven for an hour. Take out the joint and using a sharp knife slice off the skin but leave all the fat. Score the fat diagonally, and again in the opposite direction so you have diamond shapes popping out, making the joint look a bit like a hedgehog. Smear liberally with your fave mustard - it might be whole grain or smooth, just as you like. Then add your sweet ingredient of choice, so pour the maple syrup, spoon the honey or using your hands, clart the sugar onto the surface of the fat to make it cling. Put the joint into a roasting pan. Spoon all the veg out of the cooking juices and scatter around the joint. Add a few generous tablespoons of the liquor around the joint and then roast in a hottish oven for 45 minutes. This can be eaten hot, as it comes, with baked spuds and red cabbage casserole (a future recipe), with the cooking vegetables and a swirl of the pan juices, and is wonderful cold in sandwiches or with salad. Also great sliced and fried for breakfast with a duck egg.
Duck Egg Brioche:
375g strong white flour
2.5 teaspoons dried yeast
2 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
6 duck eggs
200g softened unsalted butter
Mix the yeast with a couple of tablespoons of water and put to one side. Put the flour, sugar and salt into a large mixing bowl. Make a well in the centre of the flour mix and add the yeasty water, 5 of the duck eggs (beaten) and mix together to make a soft , damp dough. Turn the dough onto a floured surface and knead for 10 minutes until it's nice and elastic. Wash and dry your mixing bowl and then grease it with a knob of melted butter (taken from the 200g). Put your dough in the bowl and turn it to make it nice and buttery all over. Cover the bowl with a clean tea cloth and leave to rise for an hour or more in a warm place to double in size. Using your knuckles, knock it back and leave to rest for another 10 minutes. By hand, squish small nuts of butter into the dough, until you've added 175g. Turn out again onto a floured surface and knead for a few minutes til the butter is evenly incorporated. Grease a pound loaf tin with butter. Divide the dough into ten balls and place them, 5x2 into the loaf tin. Cover the tin with your tea cloth and let the dough double in size once more; this should take half an hour. Heat the oven to 220c/425f/gas7. Brush the loaf with an egg yolk mixed with a dash of water and bake for 20-25 minutes. Turn out of the tin and leave to cool on a wire rack, or, like us, tear off balls of brioche and eat warm with raspberry jam.
