Asparagus, how do we love thee? Let me count the ways…

The best way to consume asparagus, in my opinion as a slight health nut, is to steam, briefly blanch or stir fry it to retain all its wonderful nutrients before eating it as a side or adding it to salads. You could also just grill it with some olive oil, salt and pepper and eat it as is. Its javelin-like shape lends itself to dipping; throw away the breadsticks because everyone is partial to asparagus with freshly made lemony hollandaise! But how about dipping your spears in a garlicky aioli, or some hummus, or the runny yolk of an egg, or a smoky baba ghanoush or a pesto? In fact, you could purée the asparagus and add it to pesto genovese for a vitamin packed green pasta sauce. Speaking of its long limbs, asparagus is asking to be wrapped up into cigar like appetisers. Pancetta or bacon is an obvious choice, but you could also wrap the spears with strips of puff pastry, sprinkled with Gruyère. Or how about a layer of anchovy paste with a filo pastry?

It’s safe to say there are many ways we love this spring sprout. Here are my three ways with asparagus:

Miso Chicken with Asparagus Salad

Asparagus, Bacon and Goat’s Cheese Tart

Beef, Asparagus and Mango Summer Rolls with Peanut Dipping Sauce

On my first trip to Thailand recently, I discovered more about the food and the guiding philosophy behind it. Like other South East Asian cuisines such as Cantonese and Vietnamese, Thai food bases itself on the principles of harmony between four flavours: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. It’s the artful balance of these flavours, alongside the fresh, flavourful ingredients and herbs abundant in Thailand, that so sate our appetite.

The following six recipes are my take on my favourite Thai dishes. Where authentic ingredients are not widely available, I have injected some British nuances to create a delightful fusion of flavours.

Thai spicy ‘som tam’ style slaw

Thai spicy ‘laab moo’ pork salad

Thai piquant grapefruit and prawn salad

Thai jungle chicken skewers

Thai red duck curry

Thai slow roast spare ribs with spicy Isarn dipping sauce

It works like this; we’ve put together a delightful hamper of expertly butchered cuts from each part of the same animal. Some of the cuts are household favourites such as Fillet Steak, others you might not be familiar with, for instance a Silverside Salmon Cut.

Each cut however is delicious in its own right, giving you a chance to try traditional cuts that you won’t find in a supermarket, and ensuring there is no waste from the animal.  You’ll also find inside the hamper descriptive and informative recipes cards, giving ideas as to how to best use each fresh piece of meat.

At Farmison & Co we believe native breed meat tastes better, and we’re committed to native breeds like Longhorn, Galloway, Highland, and Dexter. They taste better because they haven’t been bred to produce meat on an industrial scale: where whether a cow is suitable for meat depends on its ability to put on weight in a short space of time by eating poor quality feed.

Unsurprisingly this industrially made meat doesn’t taste as good, and if you’re not used to much else, it may came as an almighty shock as to how good slowly reared beef can be.

Then there’s the problem of how industrially produced meat is put together. In light of the recent horsemeat scandal it just goes to show you can never be certain what you’re getting in lower quality meat. Processed meat by nature is the supermarket’s way of making more money out of natural foods, bringing it from afar, divvying it up and making it more lucrative. But these reconstituted foods have poor nutritional value. That’s the argument of Joanna Blythman – Farmison & Co blogger and foodie author of “What to Eat”- who suggests a link between additives and novel ingredients of processed foods to the modern endemics of obesity and food allergies.

We’re often asked though why we market native breeds as tasty if they’re so scarce. However it’s precisely because they’re not eaten enough that they’re rare and  by buying a beast – or any cut of our native breed beef – you can be sure that the animal is allowed to mature, you’re giving a fair price to our Great British farmers, and there’s nothing unwanted ending up in the food chain. In fact we can trace our animals right back to the fields they were raised in.

So go on, celebrate British Beef Week and broaden your culinary horizons through trying different breeds, and widen your recipe repertoire through making full use of the animal you purchase: just click here.

Right now we have a Whole Baby Stilton – weighing in at 2.2kg – ready to be eaten. Smooth and creamy, and complete with distinct blue veins, this truly is the stuff of love poetry.

We want you to give it – or any cheese for that matter – poetic justice. Pen an ode to cheese in whatever form you like, from limerick to ballad, then send it in to competition@farmison.com or tweet it to us @farmisonUK and this bundle of joy could be on its way to you.

If you want to further show off your literary accomplishments pop your poem on our Facebook wall: though don’t forget to enter you need to send your contact details to the email address above.

Our panel, well versed in both poetry and cheese, will pick their favourite rhyme on Friday April 19th, and we’ll be emailing the winner to arrange how to drop off this inspirational lump of cheese.

Know someone with a way of words, and a weakness for cheese, Facebook or Tweet this to ‘em!

Our top three were:

1st: Sarah Cooper’s Farmison & Co Farmyard (pictured above)

Here’s our full range of entries:

It’s a big deal for us too. Just like with rare and native breed pigs, sheep, and cattle, we have a choice in what fresh produce we sell. Our new range of seafood reflects our underlying ethos that sustainability is key, and preservation of traditional husbandry (and fishing) techniques is vital.

Things are a little bit more complicated with fish though than simply farming native or rare breeds, and then doing that industrially or free-range. For one there’s the problem of bottom trawling which damages the seabed as nets are dragged over it, and the consequent problem of the lack of selectivity in what’s being caught this brings. Then there’s the lunacy of some EU law, which Hugh uncovered in the first series of Hugh’s Fish Fight. This stipulates that almost half of the fish caught in the North Sea are thrown back in as ‘discards.’

There’s plenty more issues attached too, and that’s why we’re backing Hugh’s call for 127 Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs), which will only permit sustainable fishing practices and no seabed-damaging techniques. The UK Government has yet to decide, and we would urge you to back Hugh’s campaign.

In the meantime though we’ve launched our new range of seafood. It’s completely compliant with the sustainable standards that British consumers are increasingly beginning to expect, and what’s more is it tastes fantastic.

Fished in the Bay of Biscay out of the ports of Ondarroa, Lekeitio, and  Guetaria the Basque fishermen’s methods are pretty interesting. They wait until the migrating Bonito and Yellowfin Tuna have spawned then fed and returned to peak condition, then the fisherman catch the fish using traditional rod and line methods with a twist. Once a shoal is located, they throw bait into the sea then spray the sea’s surface with high-pressure hoses to recreate a shoal of anchovies. The tuna in a feeding frenzy bite the fishermen’s hooks, and thus the seabed and other marine species such as dolphins are left untouched.

Only the required amount of fish is taken; once their quota is full the fishermen return to shore. Here the best is selected for Olasagasti (our suppliers), and here the fish is then prepared by hand, ready to be packed to maintain the organoleptic properties of the fish.

You can really taste that the Tuna, Bonito, and Anchovies too are caught when in prime condition. Each of our range are notable for their fine aroma, delicate taste, and for being rich in Omega 3.

Let’s just hope such fishing methods become the norm in light of our dwindling stocks and threatened marine environments.

You can sign Hugh’s e-petition for Government action here.

This weekend Jay Rayner of the Observer reported that the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution, used to helping pay for the care of the elderly and disabled connected in some capacity with agriculture, was increasingly having to help existing farmers just surviving on the breadline. Rural poverty is not often talked about in Britain, but across the country farmers are having to sell their herds, are struggling paying for feed, and have never been so uncertain of the future.

The key reason why this crisis has hit farmers so hard is to a large extent due to those who the farmers are beholden to: the supermarkets. Their price wars during 2010 drove milk down to record low prices, yet this shameless approach means that a dairy farmer is likely to lose 3p on every four pints of milk produced. Now, for every lamb produced a farmer is expected to lose £29, down to aggressive supermarket pricing and cheap imports from abroad, set against the cost of buying dry food to keep livestock going during the deluge.

Without being given a fair price for their produce for years but with no alternative, many farmers found themselves without cash reserves and have no choice but to sell up. It might surprise you then who backs the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution: Waitrose, Asda, and McDonalds to name a few. While their support for this lifeline is vital, it is down to these behemoths that the weather of the past 12 months has wrought such havoc in the countryside.

This could be seen as an example of ‘good PR:’ it seems the supermarkets are content to keep farmers scraping by, ensuring savings of pennies on their own brands, but not allowing enough money to trickle down to those in need.

Is this state of affairs justifiable? Sadly, but understandably, we often put price before ethics when buying our food. The supermarkets know this, they play on this, yet ultimately it was this aggressive profit-making approach that led to horse meat entering the food chain. If we all used our collective consumer clout to send a clear message that this state of affairs was not acceptable, things would soon change. For a few pence more we could take steps to back our struggling British farmers and make sure they’re getting a fair price for their produce.

We only sell British meat, we buy only the best and we make sure that our farmers get a fair price for their meat. We know that to make sure the system is sustainable you have to make sure everybody wins: the wider status quo is that the farmers don’t win, and that this crisis could result in rural catastrophe.

Please back our campaign for a fairer deal now. Send this blog to friends, family, colleagues.

Start this Easter: Buy British Meat at a fair price.

All you need to do to be in with a chance of winning is paint an egg for Easter. This ritual is well loved by children (and adults) the world over, and your design could be anything, so get creative, collaborate with family or friends, and send us your best snaps to competition@farmison.com !

There’s three prizes up for grabs: First prize is a £75 Farmison & Co voucher; second a £50 voucher, and third a £25 voucher.

Our favorites will be picked by a panel well versed in the tradition of egg painting on Tuesday 2^nd of April. That’s after the Easter long weekend so there’s plenty of time to get the creative juices flowing!

We’ll be announcing the winners that day on Twitter and Facebook, and sending them their vouchers by email.

These are our tips and hints for preparing your eggs.

1. First you’ll need to get the yolk out. Make two small holes with a straight pin, one at the top of the egg, and one at the bottom.
2. Move the pin about as much as you can without widening the holes to loosen up the insides so they’ll come out easier. It’s highly recommended you put the yolks to one side and make something later, (Jeff Baker’s Scottish Girolle Mushroom Omelette recipe is superb).
3. Once the yolk is out leave the shells to air dry, before popping them in an oven preheated to 100 degrees Celsius. Get an adult to help you out with this kids! Using a Yorkshire Pudding baking tray here is ideal while the eggs will be fine in that heat. After 30 minutes they should be completely dry inside.
4. Once cooled get painting! Acrylic paints stick better to the shell than oil based and an old egg box will come in very handy as an easel!

It might come as a shock, but a whopping 226,900 tonnes of bacon are bought in the UK a year, making it a £1.3billion industry. It’s a tasty treat for sure, with Scotland, Yorkshire and Lancashire heading up the leaderboard for most bacon consumed per capita.

That said, if you do enjoy a good bacon butty, can you be exactly sure where it came from? The majority of British pork is intensively reared, and chances are if you bought the cheapest brand in the supermarket, the animal it came from lived indoors in cramped conditions, was fattened as quickly as possible, and had to endure journeys of hundreds of miles before being slaughtered.

The British Government has taken positive steps; the infamous sow stalls for instance are now outlawed, but then again European farmers aren’t legally obliged to meet the UK’s minimum standards, so there’s no all encompassing code of practice for bacon producers.

Then there’s the familiar problem of disease in the pigs, the poor quality of the meat, and the potential health risks of added hormones and chemicals, not to mention the findings of consumer watchdog Which? in 2011. They found there was as much as 13% added water in Morrisons’ bacon, and 12% in bacon sold by Waitrose. It sounds predictable as to where they found the highest amount of water: the cheapest packs. However, the highest amount came in a pack of Morrisons Sizzlers rindless unsmoked British back bacon, and the lowest average of added water was found in Morrisons’ bacon Value rindless back bacon which had just 3% extra liquid.[1]

Which? said: ‘Across all brands, water content ranged hugely, even between apparently identical packs. For example, two packs of the same Marks & Spencer bacon differed by 9 per cent.’

It goes to show you can never be sure what you’re getting when it comes to bacon, and the results of all this – to be frank – aren’t great. A watery mess when frying bacon is a common complaint for the customer, while the farmer can often expect to have their prices dictated to them by the supermarket.

It’s not all doom and gloom though if we’ve put you off from reaching for the frying pan. There are better ways of doing things. For one you can buy bacon from Farmison & Co. We make sure everyone in our transparent supply chain gets a good deal.

The pigs on our farms are reared slowly to maturity.  At Snowdrop Villa Farm for instance, their native breed pigs are allowed to roam about, but also have comfortable and spacious lodgings. The farmers then get a fairer price for their native breeds, and the customer. Good quality feed, using native breeds which don’t necessarily suit being reared intensively (hence often being quite rare), and being allowed to move about and roam really do translate into a much tastier bacon butty.

You might be surprised as to how competitive the alternative is, so go on give it a go.  Being ethical about food is much tastier.

We at Farmison & Co are a tad simpler; we tend to think more about cows and sheep. That’s because one of our farms – Abott’s Close Farm – is right up on the North York moors. This is James Herriot country, and getting up on’tops (as they say) is always special. The air is cool and brisk and you can see for miles across the heather.

We also get to see how our supplier Charles Ashbridge’s herds are doing. Charles has a big reputation with chefs for his rare native breeds; his menagerie includes little Dexter, majestic Longhorn, fluffy Galloway, and Aberdeen Angus cattle, plus all sorts of pigs and sheep.

That reputation for great tasting meat stems from the traditional husbandry techniques Charles uses. For instance, piglets are allowed to suckle on their mothers until they are at least 8 – 10 weeks old, almost three times longer than commercially reared piglets. When it’s warm enough the pigs are free to roam and forage in the great outdoors, but otherwise they are reared inside a warm and spacious barn. Likewise the cows and sheep get to make the most of the great outdoors, nibbling on the rich hillside grass.

That relative freedom enhances the meat, which is already pretty tasty due to the different flavours native breeds boast. Another reason the produce of Charles is top notch is because the animals, when they do to slaughter, only have to travel 15 miles. That’s a big factor for us when looking at potential farms. Across the Penines, our suppliers at the Holker Estate and Snowdrop Villa Farm do something similar.

It means the animals when they arrive at the abattoir are relaxed, and when they are butchered the meat isn’t tense. Contrast with some animals who have to undergo journeys of hundreds of miles without food or drink and who are scared and tense.

Food provenance is a big deal for us, and because we know Charles personally and we can trace the meat we sell right back to a field on these moors, everyone’s getting a good deal. The animals who are slowly reared and allowed to roam, the farmer who is encouraged to use traditional techniques, and the consumer who can map the (delicious) meat’s journey from farm to fork.