Easter Lamb Recipes

12 Apr

I’m just back from a weekend in Shropshire visiting my mum for Mother’s Day. My mum lives in a very rural area of the county, surrounded by fields and farms. There are an awful lot of sheep, and at this time of the year especially, some very tired looking farmers. It is lambing season in the countryside and the fields were full of sheep and lambs. We cycled up to the local farm and watched as the farmer and visiting vet helped the sheep to birth lambs. In the words of my youngest daughter Dot (a vegetarian); “It’s er, a lot, mum!” was one comment, and another “I so badly want a baby lamb mum, can we? Why can’t we?” Visits such as this one to Shropshire in springtime are a good reminder for me, also I suppose my kids, about my views on eating meat. Witnessing smaller scale farming operations, with high animal welfare as a core principle are important. I’ll be honest, we don’t eat a lot of meat as a family day to day, but when we do, I buy the best quality and try to make a real event out of it. My mum buys her lamb and pork direct from the (exceptionally small scale) farmer less than a mile up the road from her cottage. Here in Bristol, when I do buy meat, I always buy organic, and I often choose to cook recipes that encourage me to stretch the quantity of meat I buy with complementary, generous ingredients, most often plenty of vegetables, as the thrifty, nutritious bulk to any meal.

I have 3 daughters living at home, two of whom are vegetarian, meanwhile my middle daughter, Ivy, very much enjoys eating meat. My husband Matt is the son of a Kiwi Butcher, so butchery and eating meat, mostly BBQing, was central to much of his childhood back in New Zealand. As for me, I was born in Zimbabwe and raised for a time in Botswana. And so the family tale goes, I was weaned on huge sticks of biltong, I can remember the taste and sensation deep in my first-tastes consciousness, of salty shards of air-dried meat, tough as leather, chewy and toothsome after a while, and frankly rather delicious. I still enjoy eating biltong and buy it from a south African butcher here in Bristol, all be it occasionally. I am certain there is no baby weaning guide now that would ever recommend giving biltong to babies, times have changed.

This Easter weekend we, all five of us, will be returning to my mum’s house in Shropshire to gather as a family for a celebratory Easter Sunday lunch. I always offer to cook, the kids run wild in the fields outside (weather depending), and we all try our very best to encourage my mum, their granny, to put her feet up, which she never does.
In this series of recipes, I’ve concentrated my efforts on lamb recipes to fit the season. I've tried to give enough scope with some bigger celebratory recipes using whole cuts, but also some recipes using lamb mince which is less expensive to buy, but equally delicious and just as celebratory if you ask me. So, whatever your plans are for Easter weekend, make some time to cook one of these recipes, I certainly will be, I’ll be using lamb from the smallholding just up the road from my mum, but as duty calls, I will also be cooking something equally tasty and veggie for two of my daughters and my step dad. No doubt there will also be more than a few chocolate Easter eggs too. And next week on @5oclockapron instagram I will be compensating (?) by cooking some incredible veggie centrepieces to go alongside any and all of these lamb recipes.

For the next series of recipes on my website, when the kids head back to school, I will be looking at packed lunches and trying my best to give you some inspiration for the absolute slog that the years and years of school packed lunches that primary and secondary school prove to be. Fortitude is what’s needed, that and enough quick and easy recipes to get through the experience relatively unscathed. I should know, I have been packing school lunches now for a solid 13-year stretch.