Lamb with yoghurt

One of our favourite stalls at the Farmers' Market is Mill Farm Organic, an organic farm with an old mill on the grounds just a few miles away.  They're not the cheapest but their produce is absolutely top quality, you know the animals have led a good, natural life and it's good for my environmental conscience to eat meat that lived three miles away and was slaughtered and butchered locally too.

As well as doing all the local markets, they have a farm shop on the site and two marked walking routes that you can follow around the farm.  Today brought an unusual combination of the Manicure Maniac and I both being free and a bright blue November sky, so we drove over to Mill Farm to do one of the walks and check out the farm shop.

The walk was fun - we did the shorter of the two and got some pretty country houses, an ancient bridge over the River Wey, a noisy dog and some cows, sheep, and chickens.

The shop was a delight: all the meat that we see at the market, plus local produce from other producers in the form of butter, milk, eggs, sauces and chutneys and veg.  There was only a limited range of herbs and spices, but other than that we were able to buy everything for tonight's dinner.

I've been thoroughly enjoying the current series of Nigel Slater's Simple Cooking on the BBC and today's chance for top-quality local lamb seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up this recipe.  As has become usual when I've cooked something that's been published recently, I won't copy the recipe out - just go through to the BBC site, watch the video and follow it from there.  All I did was substitute rosemary for thyme in the lamb marinade, at my girlfriend's suggestion, and used dried mint instead of fresh in the yoghurt dressing to save a trip to the local shops (I really must get a herb garden going next year - not easy in a one-bedroom flat, but we do have a patio).  Oh, and there weren't any lamb cutlets, so we used chump chops - no great shakes, just use any cut that's suitable for grilling or frying.

The fresh ingredients - lamb, cabbage, cucumber and yoghurt - all came from the farm shop, including this incredible cabbage.  Sorry for the dodgy flash in this shot, but it was the only way I could make sure you can see the display on the digital scales.

 

Yes, that is a 2.7kilo cabbage.

Taste verdict

Nigel Slater does himself proud again: I've generally had good results from his stuff.  This was simple to make, delicious and filling.

Financial verdict

Quite a tricky one to calculate, this. A pack of three organically reared Black Welsh Mountain Lamb chump chops cost a princely £3.86, which I think was very good value.  The monster cabbage was £1.80 and the pot of yoghurt a similar amount, with the cucumber at 80p.  We ate all the lamb, but I still have plans for the other ingredients so I will get a bit more money's worth out of them.