One of Anna's Christmas gifts was The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (http://www.rivercottage.net/). Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall seems to be a Prince Charles type toff with a taste for things "green". A lot of what he advocates, eat local, avoid factory animals, makes sense to us but he goes fabulously over the type in lauding the better flavour of locally coppice grown charcoal over foreign imports. One imagines a tasting party at which chinless connoisseurs spit out pieces of pulled pork before expounding on the provenance of the charcoal used to barbecue it.

Anyway, on the weekend we gave one of his recipes, citrus braised lamb shanks, a go, starting with seeking out a local sheep farmer and driving to his farm to collect animal pieces. Total meat cost for this amazing meal was $17.73. It's a bit of work though.

Shanks browning, mirepoix sweating, stock reducing:

ingredients blended on the stove top:

into the oven for a couple of hours:


Excellent, really an exciting blend of flavours. Even the baked beet, an accidental choice of vegetable enhanced the mix (Jim, sent to buy turnips for making leftover goose stew, came back with this special kind of red turnips... beets! They didn't work for the stew, but complemented the lamb beautifully). A feast for two


and, if you don't mind overlooking the cooked state of the bones, something for the dog
and then, of course, a delicious mash of stock components for the chickens:

Everything reused and we still have a jug of lamb stock. Local food, minimal wastage, true to the spirit of the cookbook. Shame about the petrol used in fetching the lamb and us living so far from France. Once you consider the food miles on the wine, dinner here can rarely be truly green.