Newsletter 06: for fortnight beginning 15th March 2010

hoping for signs of spring

The cold winter continues but at least the weather, down here anyway, is fine. It is still a little early for them to be frolicking among the buttercups but there are plenty of lambs out in the fields. A few years ago there would have been a lot more but the days when March, with its Irish stews was the end of the ‘sheep year’ and Easter and the first of the New Season lambs was the beginning of a new one are long gone. I know up north, where the weather is harsher, things are still much more traditional. Ewes lamb in the spring and spend the summer on more distant, often upland pastures, before being finished on the last of the summer grass in September and October. Often this might extend into the autumn and winter with dairy farmers buying in store lambs or renting out fields to shepherds. The sheep, who aren’t as fussy as cows, give the old grass a nice close shave so, come spring, there will be 100% sweet succulent new growth for the cows. Anyway it has all been on the Archers so I’m sure you know it already...

These days, in the south west, farmers lamb from late October onwards with their Dorset ewes, right through until mid summer so most of the lambs we get are approximately the same age. The old distinctions between spring lamb, lamb, hogget, wether and mutton are largely superfluous. These days it is lamb or mutton with the lambs varying in age from four to nine months. From a business perspective this is fine. It needs a skilled stockman to produce a batch of year old hoggets in prime condition after a winter in the field and when all our farmers lambed in the spring, with the New Zealand get out clause out of the question, it was hard to maintain supply. But when a year old hogget is good it is very good - tender, with bags of flavour and texture without being too strong. A nine month old lamb is nearly there - but not quite.

There isn’t much lamb in the boxes this fortnight but it does span Saint Patrick’s Day so I feel duty bound, despite my complete lack of Irish blood, to regress to what I think is one of the finest comfort food recipes ever; Richard Corrigan’s ‘two potato’ Irish Stew. You can find it at www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1698/irish-stew. It sounds obvious but chucking in both waxy and floury potatoes is a touch of genius - resulting, not surprisingly, in wonderful potato-enriched juice. I don’t know which variety of spuds you are getting in the veg boxes at the moment but we have struggled to find good quality, floury potatoes in the farm shops. It must be something to do with last year’s weather. Last time I made it I swapped chives for spring onions to add a little crunch and texture.

Over the hill at vegbox HQ they seem to have been grading out a lot of butternut squash so we thought we would roast it with some of our harissa paste and make a sort of spicy hummus. Feedback has been fairly positive so far but you are the big taster test. It certainly adds a twist to what can be a fairly staid formula and I have tried it with virtually everything - from meatballs and flatbreads to roast lamb. You never know - if you rave about it to the powers that be we might get it on the main extras list.

We have had a couple of comments along the lines of ‘why do all the fortnightly boxes always have a whole chicken’? I can see that a fortnightly roast chicken might not be to everyone’s liking despite being high on the list in our household. There is a dinky little slide show on the meatbox website (go to recipes/poultry) which gives some basic chicken jointing instructions - but to keep everyone happy the next small box (fortnight beginning 29th March) will have chicken joints rather than a whole chicken.

Ben Watson