I never was someone who liked to eat lamb until I tasted Icelandic lamb. From then on, we’ve kept Icelandic sheep, and we probably always will, despite what a pain in the ass they can be to raise, fence-breakers extraordinaire. They are beautiful, though, and smart, with gorgeous fleeces and delicious milk … so I just don’t raise them to eat them. Mostly.

Here’s my Shepherd’s Pie recipe. It may very well be my favorite dish ever, and I like a lot of things. I started with the Joy of Cooking standard recipe, because I am a Joy of Cooking woman, learned from my grandparents, who taught me how to cook. I think the spice mixture there is dead on perfect all by itself, but I added a few things that sent it over the top, to my palette at least. I want to lick the plate when I’m done. I can hardly believe that this is a zero-milk meal for me, but it is! (except for the wine. Eat local, drink global!) I clean out my pantry and freezer looking for veg to use, and it’s all stuff I grew. Woo. And we foraged the mushrooms in our woods! (and sell them on Etsy!) I use lamb stock because I always make stock whenever we have bones left over from a roast, but I guess you could use another kind. I like the complex sweetness that the parsnips, carrots, peas, lamb and oyster mushrooms all bring to the party.

Ingredients:

1 pound ground lamb
2 carrots
2 parsnips
1 onion
1 bell pepper
2 stalks of celery
2 cloves of garlic
1 can green beans
1 can corn
1 cup peas
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
1 tablespoon mint
1 handful dried black trumpet mushrooms
1 handful dried oyster mushrooms
1 handful dried chanterelle mushrooms
1 quart lamb stock
1 cup Zinfandel
salt and pepper to taste

For the mashed potatoes:
4 potatoes
4 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup half and half

Boil the potatoes in the lamb stock with two teaspoons of salt until tender. Make mashed potatoes, set aside.

Brown the lamb in a cast iron skillet. Remove from pan, leaving fat and juices.

Brown the onion, adding oil or fat as needed. (I use lard.) Remove from the pan.

Brown the bell pepper and celery next. Add the minced garlic at the last minute.

Add back the onions and browned lamb, with all accumulated liquid, back to the pan.

Add the stock that you cooked the potatoes in, then the carrots and parsnips. Add the dried mushrooms. Add the zin.

Simmer until the carrots are beginning to get tender. Add the corn, the green beans, and the peas.

The starch from the potatoes in the stock is usually enough to thicken the liquid. If not, add cornstarch as needed. Check the seasoning — add salt and pepper as needed.

Using a scooper, cover the meat and vegetable mixture with mashed potatoes.

I like to put a dab of butter at the top of each scoop, and sprinkle panko bread crumbs mixed with a little parm. Put into a 350 degree oven until nicely golden on top. One of the smarter things we did years ago was to buy a grill with an oven. When it’s this warm, I love to use it rather than heat up the house.

Serve with a sprinkling of fresh parsley and mint. Yum.

Our woods provide us with ample oyster mushrooms. Many, many pounds of them every year. Right now, we are getting huge flushes of Aspen Oysters, far more than we can manage to eat fresh, so we dry the ones we can’t eat right away. (Why yes, we do sell fresh ones to local customers. Call us if you’d like some! They are coming fast and furious right now.)

Oysters have a very delicate flavor and it’s really easy to overpower them. I like them in omelettes with asparagus and a mild cheese. I like them in risotto. I like to make cream of mushrooms soup.

But my absolutely favorite dish is to combine them with scallops. There’s a similar slightly sweet, very delicate flavor to them both and every time we find a new flush, I’m tempted to rush off to buy scallops. Yum!

It’s a very simple dish. Sear the scallops in a little neutral oil and butter. (I use lard.) Remove.

Then do the same with the mushrooms, leaving them to cook on one side until nicely browned, then do the other side.

Deglaze the pan with a good Gewürztraminer wine. (Again, that slightly sweet wine is a great compliment to the scallops and oyster mushroom.) (I sometimes add some chanterelle mushrooms, but not too many, because I want the oyster mushrooms to be the star.)

Add back the scallops and any liquid.

I let the wine reduce by half, then add a tablespoon of cornstarch to thicken.

I sometimes serve this on homemade egg noodles or serve with a mushroom risotto.

I love this cold noodle dish on a warm day. I started with this recipe from Nigella — Soba Noodles with Sesame Seeds. One of my favorite combinations is ginger soy sauce and maple, so I experimented a bit and came up with this.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup toasted sesame seeds
10 ounce package dried soba noodles
1 handful dried black trumpet mushrooms
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
5 tablespoons ginger soy sauce
2 tablespoons maple syrup
2 tablespoons sesame oil
2 tablespoons diced chives

Directions:

Toast the sesame seeds in a dry pan over a high heat.

Put soba noodles and black trumpet mushrooms into boiling water and cook for 6 minutes until tender. Plunge them into ice cold water after draining.

In the bowl you are going to serve them in, mix the vinegar, ginger soy sauce, maple syrup and sesame oil. Separate the black trumpet mushrooms from the noodles and dice finely, add to the bowl. Add the diced chives and the cooled, drained noodles and mix together thoroughly before adding the sesame seeds and tossing again.

Let set in the icebox for 30 minutes. It’s even better the next day.

(Edited to add later — add mint. It’s even yummier!)

Peanut has always been one of our flightiest sheep. She’ll spook at anything and everything, and gets this insane look in her eyes all the time. The other night, as the sun was setting, I was watching all of the new mamas with their lambs, all sitting in a wooded area, off the path. Danny and Zippy were trotting up and down the path way, sort of excited about the warm weather, happy. As they passed Peanut and her lambs, she ran right in front of them, spooked, and both of her lambs got trampled and died. I watched it happen in horror. There was no reason for her to have done that except that she spooks so easily. All of the rest of the mamas were calm, chewing their cud.

In the best of worlds, I’d have another paddock with a shed to put the cows, but I don’t have one, and the weather is still bad enough that I’m not willing to put them somewhere with a shelter. Sigh.

So now I’ve got her in a separate little fenced in area, next to the rest of the sheep, but someplace I can keep her contained so I can milk her. She was starting to get engorged. I’ve never milked her before because she’s always been so flighty and I have lots more pleasant sheep who are used to being milked, but whatever. She and I will learn. It wasn’t too bad this morning, actually. She was very confused, but I still got a quart of milk. It’ll be nice to have fresh raw sheep’s milk again. I wasn’t going to milk the girls this year because I’m so busy and taking a class, but we’ll make it work.

Frank’s got the really unpleasant task of skinning two beautiful little ewe lambs so we can keep their pelts. I’d rather have the lambs, of course, but it would be a crime to waste those precious pelts.

This month’s Charcutepalooza Challenge was brine, and we went pretty standard and did Corned Beef Brisket, using the last remaining and oh-so-prized brisket from Elly, our poor well-loved and well-missed American Milking Devon cow who went off to freezer camp last fall. I’m from West Texas and make a mean and delicious brisket in a completely different style from the corned beef that is so common here in New England. Because it was so unfamiliar to me, I just followed the standard recipe in the Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing.

My icebox is always so full, always. So there was no way that big bowl was going to fit, no matter how I tried. We still have tons of snow around and the daytime temps are hovering around around freezing, and I have a spot on my balcony that doesn’t get any daytime sun until very late in the day. So, I put the covered bowl there to cool off the brine and we actually left it out there for 10 days with the meat in the bowl and let it brine that way. We really weren’t worried about the fluctuating temps because it’s been so cold, and it never froze because of all of the salt in the water. Perfect!

What can I say but that it worked! Perfect corned beef brisket. We again went very traditional and boiled it for three hours with some of our own purple potatoes and cabbage. Yum. There was enough left over that Frank made a lovely sandwich with it for lunch a couple of times. (If only I had time to make some rye bread, eh? But no. It’s sugaring season and we are far too far behind, per usual.) So now that I know how to make corned beef brisket, I may do it again. But I have to say that my barbecue brisket is still yummier to me.

So thanks for providing us with such wonderful meat, Elly. I still miss you! We still have about half a year with Danny, her son. I should probably make him an appointment for this fall, now, before all of the slots fill up at the slaughterhouses that I’m willing to use. I wasn’t really happy with Westminster Meat this last Thanksgiving. It was fine for the turkeys, but horrible for me. They were incredibly unprepared, ran out of ice and water, and there were several farmers with me for the six hours that I waited in line who were also very unimpressed. Damn it. I really wanted them to succeed, but I’ve been hearing horror stories from other farmers, too. Damn it.

We’ll never make our own vodka, tobasco sauce, or worcestershire sauce. But at least we are using our own tomatoes and horseradish! Still, this is just lovely. We ran out of wine the other night (horrors!) and Frank whirred up a batch of these and it reminded me of summer. Soon we will have summer!

When I can tomatoes, mine are always too watery. I don’t always use paste tomatoes and I often stick them in jars when they are frozen because it’s easier to get the skins off that way. But I figure no one is going to see what they look like, it’s faster and I’m not entering any beauty contests, right? This year I’m going to grow more paste tomatoes to cut down on the watery bit, but man I like the taste of regular heirloom tomatoes, even if it’s ugly.

We also canned our own horseradish this year and wow is it good. I made a “horseradish sauce” which Frank labeled “fancy”. He did the bulk of the preservation, just plain horseradish, put into glass jars and frozen. What a champ! Several times last fall the house was so filled with the fumes from horseradish that we had to open the windows and step outside. It sure cleaned out our sinuses! We should split the plant next year. It is finally growing, only after trying three or four times. (You know your soil sucks when you can’t grow horseradish, and yes, I did kill it one time with the tractor. Oops!)

Here’s his recipe for a Bloody Mary, Mack Hill Style:

1 quart jar home canned heirloom tomatoes
16 ounces vodka
1/2 teaspoon celery seed
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon ground horseradish
1 teaspoon black pepper

Put it all into a blender, whir until done. Serve over ice.

I find of like the crunchiness that comes from the tomato seeds and celery seeds. Yum!

I like to make our bread as nutrient dense as I can, and I am also a fan of soft bread, especially for dinner rolls. I add left-over sweet potatoes for lots of nutrition and wonderful flavor, lard from our pastured pigs, eggs from our wonderful chickens, and maple syrup from our very own sugar bush. Talk about nutrient-dense bread, huh? And it’s so good! (Click on the photo for the recipe for basic sweet potato bread, perfect for holidays like Christmas or Thanksgiving, if you ask me.)

Today, I made a variation of these onion buns from King Arthur Flour, but adding sweet potato into the bread dough, and actual onions, mushroom and garlic rather than dried. I love to use the rolls for hamburgers. To be honest, I just love them and will serve them as dinner rolls with a little butter. Yum. If I need to caramelize onions for a recipe, I often double the amount needed, then save half, just stick it in the icebox. Then when I make the bread, I don’t have to wait for the onions to cool off before spreading them on the bread dough. (Trust me — don’t put it on hot. It’s too much for the yeast or something and they come out icky in the middle.)

For the dough:

3 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups bread flour
1 cup mashed sweet potato
1/4 cup maple syrup
1 cup buttermilk
2 tablespoons lard
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 tablespoon yeast
1-1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons butter

I use my Kitchen Aid and the dough hook. Mix all ingredients except the butter together and knead for about 5 minutes on speed 2. Add the diced butter and mix until incorporated. Put in a warm space and let rise until doubled. (I also sometimes put it into the bread maker on the dough cycle. That works well, too.)

If you double the recipe (everything except the yeast), it will make a lovely loaf of bread as well as the rolls. I almost always do that. I just love the color. I love the flavor. It has a lovely texture. It’s nice and soft. It also toasts up really nicely and I can’t say enough good things about it. Oh, and it keeps well.

Roll the dough out into a rectangle. I like to use a cutting board that is the right shape and just roll it out to the edges. It sure makes it simpler, and it’s a quick way to get a clean surface when my counters are dirty because I’ve not had time to clean the kitchen lately. (When is that cleaning fairy going to show up?!)

For the filling:

2 onions, diced
3 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup mushrooms, diced
1/4 cup bell pepper, diced

(Dice it all into very small pieces so it works well as the filling. Big chunks are bad.)

Cook until it’s nice and caramelized. I add the garlic at the very end, only cooking it for about a minute. If I have left-over vegetables from last night’s dinner, I’ll add those in as well. You basically want about a cup of onion veggie filling. I often cook more than I need for other recipes, then add it to a container in the icebox. When it gets full, it’s time to make bread!

Spread the goop out on the dough. Try to spread it as thinly as you can, leaving only a single layer spread as evenly as possible everywhere over the dough surface. Be sure that the goop is at least room temperature. If I’ve just cooked it up, I’ll stick it in the freezer for 15 minutes or so. But have some patience and don’t spread it on if it’s still warm. Ask me how I know. It totally ruins the bread!

Roll it up into a log, and then I cut off the ends. Then cut the log into one inch slices with a serrated knife. Be gentle! You want them to turn out circles, so don’t be too fast and sloppy, and don’t squish the log with your fingers, either. Just nice and gentle slicing. I use a serrated bread knife.

Put the individual slices into a 9 inch cake pan that you’ve brushed with some sort of fat. I like to use bacon fat or lard. You want it nice and snug so that they’ll rise up instead of out when they bake.

Let rise until double. My house is so cold this winter that the only way I get bread to rise is to put it in the dehydrator. I hate to use plastic wrap, so I just cover the pan with a clear pie plate so I can see how it’s doing. Then bake at 400 degrees F for 15 minutes.

Enjoy! I like to use for hamburger rolls. For sandwiches. For breakfast. Or even just with some butter for a dinner roll. Yum.

Frank and I have a deal when it comes to preparing food — he pulls something out of the freezer and I figure out what to do with it. If he doesn’t do it, he’ll then nuke something I’d made earlier from the freezer. It works out well for us. I enjoy cooking and coming up with what to do whatever he pulls out.

Anyway, a couple of days ago he brought out one of the Chantecler chickens that we slaughtered last summer. We should have let them grow another couple of months, because these are little chickens. I decided to make Coq au vin because we love it. (What’s not to love with all that wine?!) I use the standard Joy of Cooking recipe, except that because I try to use all of my own stuff, I always have lots of substitutions. This came out pretty tasty, so I thought I’d document it for future reference.

First, take apart the whole chicken into parts. Then brown each piece in bacon fat. Remove them onto a plate and cover to keep warm.

1 cup diced carrot
1 leek, diced
1/2 cup diced bell pepper
1/2 cup diced celery

(Both the bell pepper and the celery aren’t in the original recipe, but I put them in almost everything I make. I have bags and bags of them pre-cut in the freezer. Frank does that when he harvests them from the garden and I love having it.)

I cooked the veggies in bacon fat for about five minutes. Add 1/4 cup of whole wheat flour and cook the roux for about five minutes.

Add:

1 can tomatoes (I used my own can of heirloom tomatoes from last summer)
1 handful dried tomatoes (again, our own)
1 handful dried black trumpet mushrooms
1 handful dried chanterelle mushrooms
3 cups Zinfandel
2 cups chicken stock
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary
1 tablespoon fresh oregano
1 tablespoon fresh sage
2 dried bay leaves
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

(I am so loving having fresh herbs in the middle of winter! They’ve been doing pretty well on top of the icebox, as long as we remember to water them.)

I used the can of tomatoes and the dried tomatoes in place of tomato paste, again because I’m trying to use what I have. I’ve only tried to make tomato paste once. It took forever and then I burned it, and I’ve yet to try again. Maybe this year. But we got the deep tomato flavor anyway with my substitution.

Bring to a boil, then add the chicken parts back with any liquid, cover the pot and simmer for about an hour. Because I used so many dried mushrooms, the sauce was pretty lumpy, so I pulled all the chicken out as well as the bay leaves, then hit it with a stick blender. Then I put the chicken back in to let it all simmer together for a while.

In a separate pan, caramelize two cups of pearl onions in a bit of bacon fat and butter. I didn’t do button mushrooms that the original recipe calls for because we certainly don’t have fresh mushrooms in the middle of February in New Hampshire, but I think the black trumpets and chanterelles gave this enough mushroom flavor anyway. Add the onions to the pot and stir well.

I served it on top of noodles and it was really yummy. The house smelled so good, too. Yum. I really like the flavor of these Chantecler chickens, even though they are pretty small birds. This year we’ll let them grow a few months longer, but their diet of grass and bugs makes for a really flavorful bird with a really nice texture. I was worried the meat would be tough, but it was really lovely. So this is Coq au vin, Mack Hill Farm style.

My grandparents taught me how to make biscuits. My grandfather taught me the basic recipe, and my grandmother taught me how to cheat. She’d tell me “oh, he says to cut the butter up real small. Let’s just cheat and use the box grater.” When we were rolling out the dough, she’d say, “oops, we rolled it out too thin. Let’s just cheat and double it up and over and no one will ever know.”

Shred two sticks of unsalted butter on your cheese grater. I do mine on a cutting board, then stick it into the freezer until I need it. Save the wrapper from the butter to use to butter the pan before you put the biscuits on it. It there wasn’t enough butter on the wrapper, I spread bacon grease on the pan with a brush.

Mix 4 cups whole wheat flour, 1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt.

Add frozen butter to flour mixture with a fork, tossing lightly to coat butter

Add 1-1/2 cups buttermilk and stir until mixed and no more

Turn out onto floured surface and roll to 1/2 inch thick

Fold dough over on itself, so that it is now 1 inch thick

Cut out biscuits and place just touching in 9 inch round pan

Bake for 14 minutes at 450°F.

The key seems to be the shredded butter and the fold over. I don’t know why it works, but my biscuits always have a very distinctive middle, it’s the only way I get them to be light and fluffy. Rolling it out thicker gives me hard biscuits every single time, so I just always do the fold over. If I’m cutting them out in shapes, like hearts or whatever, I sometimes just stack two layers, and brush some butter or bacon fat to seal the layers together.

I don’t always use whole wheat flour. If I want a sweeter biscuit, I’ll add a tablespoon of maple syrup or honey and use a little less buttermilk. Or use heavy cream. Yum. Sometimes I use lard instead of butter, or a combination of both fats. Yummier.

We try to eat a tablespoon of our own honey every day to help with our seasonal allergies. This is sure a nice way to get that spoonful in! What a hardship.

I’ve always called my biscuits “cheater biscuits” because you can always tell I did the fold-over. My biscuits always have that split in the middle. I don’t care, though. It’s the only way it works for me, and I like light and fluffy biscuits.

I read all sorts of recipes for biscuits. I try them all, but I make sure to shred whatever fat the recipe calls for on the box grater, and freeze it. And I always roll it out too thin, and double it over. I’m so glad my grandma taught me how to cheat!

I don’t know where I heard of lamb bacon first, but it was some late night cooking show and it might have been Alton Brown. So the next time we slaughtered lamb, I asked to keep a lamb’s belly. We froze it because I wasn’t sure how to process it yet. I was looking around online, but wasn’t finding much specific. Then when I heard about Charcutepalooza, someone said any type of belly would work.

We added a few herbs to the regular dry cure recipe. (mint, crushed bay leaf, cracked peppercorns and garlic). We let it cure a week in the icebox. We rinsed off the salt, let it come to room temperature, then cooked it for 90 minutes at 200 degrees F.

I fried some up in my cast iron skilled, then cooked some shredded purple potatoes in the fat. I served it with poached eggs and a tortilla with cream cheese and our honey. I was trying to make a special Valentine’s Day thing.

It’s so lovely to have fresh eggs in February. The Chanteclers rarely venture out of their coop but are laying better than the Icelandics, who go everywhere. We are going to need to give the Icies some remedial lessons in where eggs go. We need to add some more deep bedding. It’s going to go above freezing this week. Spring is in the air and there’s lots and lots of crowing going on.

I think that the next time we take lambs to freezer camp, I’m going to have the bellies sent up to Vermont Smokehouse. I’d like to get their opinion on my spice mix. I’m wondering how it would work with some of our maple syrup.

Seriously, nothing says love like lamb bacon.

Happy Valentine’s Day