One of our Co-Farmers has been working in the Church Farm Café kitchen on Thursdays. She especially enjoys making carrot cake and would like to share her recipe:
Carrot Cake
2 tsp cinnamon
300g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
200g soft brown sugar
4 eggs
250 ml vegetable oil
200g grated carrot
Mix all ingredients and bake at 180° for about 40 minutes. Top with your favourite icing, maybe cream cheese.
Join us for a musical guest landlord’s night on Friday 8th May when Happy Daze will be entertaining us with hits from the 60’s through to 2000’s. 10% of the takings will be going to their chosen charity.
With the sun in full swing over Easter we have seen continued growth in the garden we are particularly looking forward to harvest some of our newly planted pine berries—a quirk on the classic strawberry, it’s white with red seeds and has a mild taste of pineapple.
This month’s featured recipe is the field mushroom tower that was part of the recent weekend kitchen show on 3 Counties Radio that Adrian attended. (Podcast available on iPlayer. Nick Coffer’s Weekend Kitchen, 19 April.)
Stuffed Field Mushroom Tower
4 large field mushrooms
50g grated strong cheddar
50g grated Stilton
50g grated Parmesan
50g diced feta
4 table spoons onion chutney
2 tomatoes sliced
2 table spoons oil
1/2 clove garlic (can be removed if preferred)
Salt and pepper
Did you see the post about eating lamb in spring? Enjoy this recipe from our butcher, Tony Hopkins.
1kg shoulder or leg of Church Farm mutton, diced
3 tbsp plain flour
2 tbsp olive oil
15g butter
2 celery sticks, roughly sliced
1 leek, washed and roughly sliced
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2 carrots, roughly sliced
400g floury potatoes, roughly diced
400g swede, roughly diced
500ml fresh lamb stock, hot
400ml carrot juice
2 fresh sprigs each rosemary and thyme, plus extra to garnish
100g pearl barley
Preheat the oven to 180°C/Fan 160°C/Gas 4. Put the cubed mutton in a large bowl, add the flour and season. Toss well.
Put a large casserole over a high heat. Add the oil and brown the mutton in batches.
Turn the heat down to medium and add the butter. Stir in the celery, leek, garlic, carrots, potatoes and swede and toss well. Cook, stirring occasionally, until browning a little. Pour in the lamb stock and carrot juice, then add the rosemary and thyme. Bring to the boil, cover and cook in the oven for 2 1/2 hours, until tender.
Stir in the pearl barley 30 minutes before the end of the cooking time, so it absorbs the juices and becomes tender. The stew should be thick and juicy. Season, garnish with rosemary and thyme and serve with rustic bread.
In my opinion (I’m Tony, the butcher), lamb for Easter is all wrong. While “spring lamb” has undoubted marketing appeal for supermarkets, spring is when lambs are meant to be born. So what are you eating? In fact, when you buy “spring lamb,” you get animals that were born in the autumn, specifically for the Easter market. Mostly they are reared indoors, with their mothers, who often continue to suckle them until they reach slaughter weight. Ewes and lambs will be turned out on spring grass in early March, but they’ll get only a couple of weeks to graze before they go to slaughter. The resulting meat, known in the trade as “suck lamb,” is sweet but pale and, I think, a bit porky.
So should we never eat lamb at Easter? I often eat sheep—either mutton (an animal of two years or more) or, best of all for flavour and tenderness, hogget (a one-year-old in its second spring or summer). Both mutton and hogget animals should have a good covering of fat, which means they can be hung properly— 10-14 days is about right—after which they end up even more tender than lamb, and can be served pink. A few good butchers will sell you mutton and hogget, and both are available here at Church Farm or from our online shop.
So when is the best time to eat lamb, in the true sense of the word? During the summer months, in my opinion. February-and March-born lambs (look out for bottle feeding at the Farm soon) are invariably put out to graze within a few weeks of being born, and learn to eat grass, as well as their mother’s milk, before they are a month old. They exercise far more than indoor-reared lambs, which gives their meat a finer grain and more flavour. Slaughtered in the coming weeks, at five or six months old, their meat is still sweet, but much more rosy and vivacious. This is the flesh of animals that, though young, have lived a little, with grass under their feet and sun on their back.
Christmas food!
Party nibbles, champagne, seafood bonanzas, magnificent meats in the form of geese, turkey, beef and more, puddings and cakes galore!
And……swede.
Now, I know, swede neither entices nor delights any of the senses normally. It’s large, woody looking root, that’s beige (never a good start) and is often left rattling around the veg cupboard because no one knows what to do with it.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, the swede should not be estimated. Coupled together with a few delicious rashers of Church Farm bacon, a garlic clove, and some flavoursome stock, swede takes on a whole new light!
Swede and bacon pie! Its an excellent winter warmer, and really show cases this root vegetable, an opportunity it seems to rarely get! And this is such a shame, as swede is very versatile. You can roast it, stew it, soup it, mash it (swede make excellent mash), chip it (yes, chip it! Sprinkle liberally with salt, pepper and parmesan for an alternative to potato wedges), and it keeps for ages. Just store in a cool place, and all is well in the land of the swede.
So, what you need is:
Method:
Fry off the garlic and onion in a little olive oil, add the bacon and brown. Dice the swede and carrot and add to the pan with the thyme leaves (strip them from the stalks) and season. Add the stock, and simmer for around 10 minutes or until the veg are tender.
Meanwhile, boil the potatoes in a pan of salted water, when al dente, drain and mash with plenty of salt and pepper. Transfer the veg mix to a pyrex pie dish, and add the mash topping. Sprinkle with cheese, and grill until the cheese has melted and is golden brown. Delicious!
I had the most stupendous dinner last night, it was a variation on a simple and staple dish from my student days. When you are poor and hidiously under nourished like the majority of students were at my university (all self inflicted of course, this is by no means a reflection on parents or educational bodies), anything involving anything green was a real boost for brain and body. So, on treat days, I bought broccoli!
Broccoli, a treat??? Believe me ladies and gentleman stranger things have happened. Broccoli stir fried with chopped up pork and leek sausages, and then stired into a big bowl of cheese smothered pasta. Whats not to be happy about?
Today, there are all sorts of broccoli that you can get your culinary mits on. Formerly known as the ‘five green fingers of jupiter’, varieties such as Purple sprouting, tender stem, and calabrese (which is the big headed bulbous thing that we all know and love) are now a common sight in markets. There is even a broccoli that looks like a cauliflower!
It is the quintessential green veg, very good for you, anyone under the age of twelve is bound to turn thier nose up at it, and its always part of a sunday roast. We Europeans have been blessed (or cursed) with the broccoli since the 1500s, and today there are many delicious ways to cook it beyond simply boiling it to death and slapping it alongside the cauliflower and carrots. You can use broccoli is Asian cusine, in soups, stews, pasta dishes, in all sorts! It keeps really well too, just make sure it goes in the fridge as soon as you receive your box and it will be quite happy for about 4 days.
So, my dinner, that I am going to share with you all is as follows.
Method:
Fry off the chilli and gralic in a little olive oil, and chop the sausages into meatballs into the pan. Cook on a medium heat until the sausage balls are browned. Add the broccoli, and keep frying for about 6 minutes, stirring to keep all the sticky goodness from the bottom of your pan and coating the veg. Add the leeks and fry for another couple of minutes. Mix the mustard into the creme fraiche, and add to the pan, stirring to melt the sauce and coat all the ingredients. Add the parsely and stir for a final minute. Serve with spaghetti and top with parmesan cheese.
Can’t get much easier really can you, and it tastes great. Enjoy!
Fry off the garlic and onion in a little olive oil, add the bacon and brown. Dice the swede and carrot and add to the pan with the thyme leaves (strip them from the stalks) and season. Add the stock, and simmer for around 10 minutes or until the veg are tender.
Meanwhile, boil the potatoes in a pan of salted water, when al dente, drain and mash with plenty of salt and pepper. Transfer the veg mix to a pyrex pie dish, and add the mash topping. Sprinkle with cheese, and grill until the cheese has melted and is golden brown. Delicious!
Its cold, its miserable, its muddy…On top of that we all have some flu like disease which is leaving the vast majority of Church Farm staff in a state of zombification. We all need some hearty nutritious comfort food to warm the cockles and cheer the heart. Leeks are one of my favourites from the allium family. Like all alliums, they are so versatile, so easy to get hold of, and so tasty! You can’t beat a giant bowl of gut busting sausage and leek stroganoff; make sure you get good quality sausages, and add a big spoonful of paprika and lots of lemon juice to your sauce. A-ma-zing.
But today, I am going to showcase the leeks as this is the topic of today’s conversation. The recipe still involves a white dairy based product as the base of the sauce, but instead of crème fraiche, we have double cream. Oh yes ladies and gentleman, this is not one to try if you are watching those waistlines!
This is originally a James Martin recipe, and normally I wouldn’t tamper as I think he is a great chef, but over the years it has become my own just a little bit. You will need:
Ingredients:
Method:
Melt some butter and a little olive oil in a pan, add the leeks, shallots, garlic and thyme and cook until softened. Pour in the white wine and bubble away for 5 minutes. Add the double cream, season with salt and pepper and gently simmer for another 5 minutes. Transfer the mixture to an over proof dish and leave to cool. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 180C. Once the leeks have cooled, scatter over most of the grated cheese. Lay the tomato slices over the cheese to form a layer, and scatter over the parsley, followed by the rest of the cheese. Bake for around 30 minutes.
This is a side dish, but to be honest, who is going to judge if you curl up in front of Doctor Who with just this and a big spoon. It covers most food groups, and is delicious. When you receive your leeks in your boxes, they will store quite happily in the fridge for the week, but might be a bit bendy come next Friday! Enjoy!
