Breaking tradition this Easter

Often when picturing Christmas and Easter we think of traditions and enjoying a family favourite meal every year. Whilst there is nothing wrong with a bit of home comfort and being happy with a dish you feel confident in cooking, we think that taking the leap and trying something entirely new can be great fun!

Firstly, it offers us the opportunity to master a new cooking technique, with an entirely new cut of meat. Most of us at Field & Flower have fully stocked spice racks and love getting creative with pairing new cuts and spices. We love combining sumac with chicken or salmon for a zingy flavour. Have a look at our friends at Rooted Spices to see their delicious single origin spices. The sense of accomplishment you feel when successfully creating a new recipe with something you had little knowledge of cooking is a great feeling. That dish might become a new favourite and maybe even a new tradition if it’s loved by everyone!

From a sustainability point of view, varying our consumption of meat helps to utilise the whole animal, meaning the usually discarded parts end up on more of our plates. Supermarkets have taught us to favour a small selection of easy to cook cuts, forgetting about the more unique options, the bones & offal, which offer important nutrients. This is world’s away from how our grandparents lived, who made the most of the whole animal and had an understanding of what to do with those different cuts.

I lived on a smallholding for 5 years before joining Field & Flower and I learnt more in those 5 years about "nose to tail" eating than I had ever been taught in school. We boiled down pigs trotters to make gelatine, used the brain to make brawn (gruesome as it sounds to some, this was a ubiquitous cooking technique for many years) which can most closely be compared with a Rillette or a terrine, and cooked down the flare fat over a low-slow heat to extract fat to make lard…not a scrap was wasted. Some people may find this concept a bit hair raising but using the whole animal is the most sustainable thing we can do as meat eaters.

The boom of the street food industry, I believe, has helped educate us in appreciating the various ways we can consume the parts we aren’t always certain what to do with. New pop-ups help fight the case against food waste in creating dishes out of cuts that are falling in popularity, giving them a new lease of life and getting them back on more of our plates. I remember attending one street food event a few years back and saw a vendor that was selling flash fried lambs hearts with sautéed spuds and chargrilled corn. It was perhaps the busiest stall, the cooking technique made it taste like thin bits of steak in a delicious marinade. I have since replicated that dish at home and not been disappointed. Seeing this food vendor so busy with a large queue was brilliant to see and solidified the fact that we Brits are open to new cuisine.

Being inspired by new cuts, new cooking techniques and also other cultures will really help us to be more creative in the way we cook. Luckily for us, we are living in a time where the food industry is booming and every style of cookery book is available to us, so trying new things isn’t all that daunting.

So if you want to try something new this Easter but aren’t quite sure where to start then we have done some of the hard work for you and created some rather interesting recipes!

We stepped out of our cooking comfort zones and poached a whole chicken for the first time ever and the results were incredible despite the "winging it" attitude we took when cooking it. The plus is that we’re now confident in poaching a chicken and recommending this cooking technique to others. Poaching isn’t a technique that we use often in the UK whereas it is used often in Asian and some Eastern European cultures. At Field & Flower we are zealous home cooks and the recipes we have created are easy to follow and pair perfectly with our pretty special meat cuts.

Let’s get creative in the kitchen and if you accidentally add way too much za’atar or forget the most important spice, then hey at least it’ll be a memorable meal and a great story if nothing else. We all make cooking mishaps but when they unexpectedly turn into a masterpiece, isn’t that the sweet spot!

See the recipes here:

• Pesto topped mutton
• Swedish inspired baked salmon with quick pickled cucumber and a dill & lemon cream
• Poached chicken with saffron rice and herbed yoghurt
• Roast butterflied leg of lamb with Mediterranean vegetables