Lovely Lamb

In my food column this month for The Gloss magazine I write about Spring lamb and a time for learning.

New born lambs are appearing in the fields around our house. This happens just as my friends and neighbours bear the weary eyes of long nights in sheds with bawling ewes, or bottle feeding the unwanted or third in a triplet set in the kitchen.

The valley I live in is mountainy marginal land and has very few cattle anymore. Most of the sheep farms have consolidated into a remaining ten to twenty farmers with their own home farm and sheds, who rent extra land from families that have left farming. Close to us the Hogans, McKees and Keegan's of @waterfallfarm shop are in the thick of the lambing season. In a fickle marketplace it's a business with price rises and crashes like everything else. Sheep are also notoriously tricky to rear and I've witnessed myself the old adage - the first indication of illness in a sheep is mortality. Yet the farmers still stay up all night, both men and women, to lamb ewes, to get the newborn started on feeding and nurse the ones not thriving.

Lambing season here is something both myself and my children delight in. The squeals of delight in response to newly born lambs bucking and skipping on their first day out on grass say it all. It's a pity that as a foodstuff in Ireland we are eating less lamb and it's now purchased by mainly older consumers. I love lamb. I buy half a lamb from the farm across the lane every year and for me it tastes like home.

 

This Edible Life  March 2014

One of my Spring pleasures - holding a new born lamb is unfortunately contraindicated to eating one. Not only are they too cute with their little velvet muzzles, early lamb can have a jelly-like texture and is much better killed at about five months old. While the garden eases into Spring I´m still cooking plenty of dark cabbage and have successfully converted all cabbage sceptics with my fabulous Gnocci with Savoy cabbage and Wicklow Blue or fried off with chorizo and garlic for an easy soup with vegetable stock and cream.

Around Dublin I´ve fallen in love with The Green Bench cafe on Montague Street (as if those pesky Dublin 8-ers aren´t served with enough great spots for a quick lunch). The serve lovingly-made take out for at your desk or if you´re like me - on the run from one venue to the next.  Super moreish is their wrap of citrus marinated feta with avocado, olive tapenade and hummus.

Not far away on Stephen´s Street, P. macs is a more comfy version of the cocktail zinc bars populating the South William street area. There´s lampshades straight from your grandmothers, patchwork armchairs and if you don´t feel like wearing towering heels it’s cosy for a quiet drink in the snug and some decent pizza. Another dress-down hide out for early evening is open downstairs on Dawson street. FAATBAAT serves a multitrip of cuisines – everything from Japanese ramen dishes to Malaysian “Drunken Prawns”. Their Go Go Bar is what this place is all about though with great tunes and decent cocktails.

Always a hot social ticket, the best food producers in the country compete on the 12^th March for a gong from my own parish – the Irish Food Writers Guild. The awards will be hosted by Derry and Sally-Ann Clarke in the wonderful L´Ecrivain. We have some stunning food and drink entries, all Irish artisan-produced but I am sworn to secrecy. Follow the winners and recommendations from the day at twitter @foodguild.

 

No better time than Spring to sharpen cookery skills. To mark her new book The Extra Virgin Cookbook, Susan Jane White is hosting an evening of cooking and tasting at Fallon and Byrne on the 12^th. Countrywide, it´s great to see many people I admire in food offering their expertise. JP McMahon, Michelin-starred chef and owner of Aniar in Galway has day workshops this month in “Nose to Tail Eating” and “The Whole Hen”. Down in Thomastown the inspiring Mag Kirwan is holding classes in smoking at her Goatsbridge Trout Farm.

Close to the beautiful beach at Termonfeckin in County Louth, the Tasty Tart Tara Walker has classes in cooking fresh fish landed at nearby Clogherhead and Foods of the Middle East, timely with the huge popularity of Ottolenghi. If you have a few bob ditch Ottolenghi and go to Beirut, one of my favorite cities for food - figs, hummus fatteh, baba ghanoui… Or closer to home check out Silvena Rowe´s cooking in at Quince in London´s Mayfair Hotel and her gorgeous book Purple Citrus and Sweet Perfume: Cuisine of the Eastern Mediterranean

A party about ...lamb prices

I spent last night at a party with neighbours talking about farming, the price of food and how most farmers in my area now had off-farm employment in order to keep going. One neighbour told me how even when he farmed 1000 ewes he couldn't make a living producing lamb. He now works night shifts in a factory to pay the bills, keeping a few sheep but not planning about getting back into farming full time. He laughed as he looked at the drink in his hand "Basically it wouldn't put diesel in the car".

It's the same story on so many farms across the country."So what's your solution?" I asked. He shrugged his shoulders - "no one wants to pay more for food and that's what lies at the bottom of it". He's right, we do want our food cheap and retailers know that; employing hugely competitive strategies to get our business. Competition between them is relentless and they use two for one offers, discounts and sell some goods like milk below cost to get customers in the door.

Milk is a KVI - a retail term which means "known value item". Many shoppers search for bread or milk at the lowest price possible as households use a lot of these foodstuffs. But consumers will also pick up food other than just KVIs in a store, so the retailers sell product at a loss in order to to make profit on other lines. Unfortunately the person at the end of the chain - the farmer, is who suffers. Recently in the UK, huge pressure on the retail price of milk caused farming protests and eventually, agreement on a code of practice between the dairies and the farming unions. Some retailers also agreed to put up the price for milk, a surprising move in a market that is as sharp as Ireland if not more competitive.

Food prices in Ireland actually have varied little in the past five years, and one of the reasons for this is huge competition among retailers for a marketplace that is in recession. Incomes have fallen and so has our food spend. Research shows we look for KVIs, discounts, offers and are shopping around more. The growth of Aldi and Lidl in both Ireland and the UK are testament to our lust for bargains. While retailers say the customer wants cheap food, we also as customers don't want a food chain where the retailer takes huge percentages of the price we pay for an item, while the person who sowed the crop or raised the livestock gets the smallest slice of the pie.

What's interesting about the farming and food policy of the present Government is their sluggishness or lack of courage in implementing a retail code of practice to encourage fairness in the chain. There's been consultation on this done by the previous Government, it was set to continue and promoted as a badly needed policy in the last election campaign but so far there is no movement on it. Yes we want cheap food but a code of practice spreads the price of that food item more evenly to all the people who contribute to it.

Lamb prices are good now but my neighbour is still not tempted to re-enter the full-time farming fray. We also talked about how Harvest 2020's targets for more sheep on Irish farms could knock back prices as higher supply tends to do. There are no easy solutions but what we all agreed was that the massive power the supermarkets wield has been let go unchecked despite promises to engage with the issue. At the end of the night we took our torches, hi viz vests and walked home on country lanes underneath the stars, stopping at another house for a nightcap, which we needed like the proverbial hole in the head. One thing that keeps rural areas strong is people talking to each other, sharing issues and concerns and also laughing - about kids, animals, livestock... or the financially perilous predicament many now find themselves in. It would be great though to see policy addressing the inequality in the Irish food chain..If we're to see a vibrant rural sector and future generations still farming, we have to step up to the plate and engage with the elephant in the room.  

Red meat - the most intense nutrient-rich food available to human beings

A new take on meat - my piece in today's Irish Independent

With celebrities from Paul McCartney to Star Wars actress Natalie Portman telling us to eat less meat, switching our shopping habits towards a vegetarian diet is one of the pieces of advice dominating the food world right now.

The rise in obesity levels combined with the unsustainable nature of beef production means that consumers are now encouraged to limit the quantity of meat they eat and turn instead to buying more vegetables, fish and meat alternatives.

But a new book by Irish butcher Pat Whelan argues that going back to the old-fashioned staples of our traditional diet; eating plenty of beef, pork and lamb is not only a healthy choice but one essential to our wellbeing. Whelan, who is the fifth generation of his family to be involved in meat production, runs a butcher shop in Clonmel, Co Tipperary and his knowledge of meat from farm to fork has earned him a Rick Stein Food Hero award.

In his book "An Irish Butcher Shop", Whelan argues that one of the reasons consumers find it easy to turn away from meat is a lack of knowledge on how to prepare it and an over reliance on inferior quality meat sold in plastic packaging in supermarkets.
He points out that beef should not be sitting in a pool of its own blood in a plastic box, and that everything about the mass production of meat and the way it's marketed to consumers is contrary to the core benefits and joys of eating it.

He argues that instead of turning away from meat, we should be appreciating its unique benefits -- red meat is the single most intense nutrient-rich food available to human beings. It's a crucial source of iron and trace elements such as zinc and copper, as well as vitamins B12 and B6.
Fat on meat is also something we shouldn't be afraid of -- it is fundamental to the taste and tenderness of the finished product.

Irish beef that is fed on pasture develops a good covering of fat which gives it great flavour. Because it's grass-fed, this makes the meat a high quality, close to organic product. Meat from grass-fed animals has up to four times more omega-3 fatty acids than meat from grain fed animals. It is also the richest known source of CLA or "conjugated linoleic acid"; an exceptional omega-6 fat which has been attributed with antioxidant and anti-cancer properties.
Most of the current opposition to beef consumption is related to cattle "feed lots" -- vast industrial-scale feeding units found typically in the US but now growing in popularity in India and China. Here animals live on a regime rich in maize and cereals which is not their natural diet.
As the appetite for beef grows across the world, we have to produce more cereals (wheat, barley and so on) to make the animal feed that cattle eat.

In many developing countries, feeding cattle (or chicken and pork in large quantities) takes other foods and water resources out of the food chain. Put simply, if everyone across the world adapted to the 'Western Diet', we'd run out of many foodstuffs, and water.

Farm animals also produce more than 10% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions but new approaches to the anti-meat argument such as Simon Fairlie's book -- Meat: A Benign Extravagance has swayed even the hardened environmentalists such as best-selling author George Monbiot back towards eating meat. Fairlie argues that it's specifically feed-lot production of cattle that reduces the world's food supply and that what we should be doing is eating meat but simply less of it.

In Ireland the situation is very different; cattle and sheep roam outdoors and eat grass which is in plentiful supply, so the beef and lamb we eat takes a minimum of inputs and is fairly sustainable.

However, most pigs and poultry in Ireland are farmed in intensive indoor units where the quality of the animals' lives is poor and again they are eating a cereal based diet.
Ireland comes closest to factory farming in these pig and chicken "units"; vast indoor sheds packed densely with animals.

The intensive production of chicken and pork over decades has also affected what we're getting on our plate -- pigs are slaughtered at about seven months old, and unfortunately quality and flavour of modern pork has been affected by the breeding of faster maturing pigs. So the consumer pays the price with an inferior-tasting product.

The bacon and rashers most of us eat have been injected with brine, and can often contain more water than meat content. So while we think mass-produced cheap rashers are good value, if they end up a third of their original size after cooking then it's a bad deal.

You might get better value from an artisan-produced pork that's more expensive raw but yields more meat when cooked. One way to keep both sides happy is to continue to eat meat but put more thought into what we buy.

Pat's book is full of recipes for everything from 'pot-roasted shoulder of lamb' to 'boozy rabbit with prunes'.

His advice is to vary what you buy from the old staples of sirloin, fillet, lamb cutlets, pork chops and rashers. Try new cuts and free-range or artisan products occasionally. The pay-off is in quality, taste and ultimately better value for money.

An Irish Butcher Shop by Pat Whelan, published by Collins Press. Suzanne Campbell's food blog is at www.basketcase theblog.blogspot.com
- Suzanne Campbell
Irish Independent

Spring Lamb from farm to fork

From Farm to Fork: Sweetbank Farm, Wicklow
The Irish Times 15/5/2010





WORDS: SUZANNE CAMPBELL
PHOTOGRAPHY: ALAN BETSON

To stressed out city folk, organic farming may seem like an idyllic occupation, but as Co Wicklow farmer Debbie Johnston explains, it's not all home-baked pies and eco-glamour.

ON A SPRING day, when the white cuddly lambs are frolicking in the fields, you could be forgiven for thinking that farming is one of the nicest occupations on the planet. At Debbie and David Johnston’s farm in Newcastle, Co Wicklow, the scene is perfect. From cut-stone farm buildings, the couple go about their work, managing 90 head of cattle, a summer fruit farm and their biggest enterprise – more than 100 organic certified ewes. But though it may seem a bucolic idyll, the Johnstons have just finished lambing, and they have a more realistic take on things.

“Lambing!” says Debbie. “The BBC did a week of television shows on it and we were just laughing watching it. For us it’s hard work, we’re exhausted now that we’ve got to the end of it.” Their ewes began lambing in mid-February. “My husband, David, does all the work. To be honest, I’m really the support crew. He goes in and out of the sheds all night and makes sure that every ewe is doing okay. You could leave them on their own but he doesn’t take that risk.”
And it can be a risky business. Debbie showed me two adorable orphaned lambs whose mothers had died. “It does happen, you do everything you can to avoid it but every farm will have a couple this time of year.” These two are well-loved characters, climbing up the fence to see us, or more accurately, to see if there’s any chance of a feed. It’s no surprise that the antics of an orphaned lamb are a current YouTube sensation.

But having cute livestock doesn’t necessarily pay the bills. Over the past year many farmers have been weeping into their mugs of tea as milk prices fell to below the cost of production, and beef and grain incomes weren’t much better. Then winter set in, which we’re only just emerging from. “In a normal year you expect your grass to be growing by St Patrick’s Day,” Debbie says. “This year was like nothing we’d seen before. We had no grass, we had to use up stocks of feed and spent days breaking ice on water troughs, sliding around the yard and praying for the weather to change.”

Luckily, spring seems to have finally arrived and it’s with spring lamb that the Johnstons have carved out a niche business for themselves. They sell direct to customers who come to their farm to pick up a box containing a whole or half lamb during the months May to October. “We did many things over the years to diversify. The land had been in David’s family for four generations but he saw the writing on the wall in terms of farm incomes dropping and knew we could no longer rely on producing the same thing year after year.”

The Johnstons’ first innovation was growing summer fruits, something they are still involved in. They opened a farm shop which they ran successfully for 10 years. “It was really lovely but we found most of our customers were coming to the coffee shop and not really buying our produce. The reality is you have to be selling what you grow, and when we costed the time and effort to run the shop, we called it a day.”

At the moment, a mix of beef, summer fruits and organic lamb is working well. “You always have to be thinking on your feet with farming, and what we do is to offer top quality, grass-fed lamb at a really attractive price. Our product is up to 30 per cent cheaper than the supermarkets and selling direct is a way of controlling what we produce, all the way to the customer. We are not waiting for market fluctuations or depending on someone else to set the price.”
Debbie keeps a close eye on the business end of the farm and the minute something stops making money, “that’s when you change your strategy. It’s hard when there’s such a drive to make food cheaper, but cheap imported food is a false economy for all of us. After all, farming and food employ 300,000 people in Ireland.”

What keeps her doing what she’s doing when margins are so tight? “Sometimes you really wonder why you keep going,” she says with a laugh. “But I do really love it and I still get attached to the livestock, I even get a bit sad when animals are loaded into the trailer.”
Nevertheless, attachment to their lambs doesn’t stop her giving me her top cooking tips. “Keep it simple,” she advises. “The flavour is there, so you don’t need much seasoning. I like to butterfly the leg, stick in some sprigs of rosemary and roast it on the barbecue. Or if you’ve a few people coming, use the loin of the lamb, tie in some herbs and cloves of garlic, pop it into the oven and serve with some new potatoes.” Cute or not, now I want to start cooking.
The Johnstons’ lamb is available from their farm at Tiglin, Newcastle, Co Wicklow. A half lamb is €85 and a full lamb is €190. A half lamb cut to customers’ requirements is roughly the size of an average freezer shelf.
See sweetbankfarm.com; tel: 086-1730497

FROM FARM TO TABLE
Ring of Kerry Quality Lamb is a group of 27 farmers who sell their lambs direct. All lambs are matured for a minimum of seven days and cut to the customer’s specification. ringofkerryqualitylamb.ie.

Fieldstown Farm in North Co Dublin delivers half or whole lambs, butchered to your specific requirements, to addresses in the greater Dublin area (whole lamb minimum for delivery). Customers from further afield can collect their order. irishfood.ie.

Lambdirect.ie is a group of eight farmers from Mayo who farm, butcher and sell their own mountain and lowland lamb. They offer cuts packed in sealed trays ready for the oven or freezer. This summer they plan to offer a barbecue pack. Free local delivery once a week in their van. Contact: Ray Cawley, Shanvallyard, Tourmakeady, Co Mayo.

Doolin Farm Direct supplies local limestone-reared lamb direct to the consumer through box schemes, on-line orders and farmers’ markets. Contact Alan Nagle, tel: 086-4014132, doolinfarmdirect@gmail.com.

Comeragh Mountain Lamb in Waterford offer boxes of lamb; a full lamb includes legs, shoulders, cutlets, loin and gigot chops, and mince. Recipes included with every delivery. comeraghmountainlamb.ie.