Pomegranate lamb, lentils and preserved lemonwhite bean mash
A lip-smacking dish that you can use with lamb (or beef) left over from your Easter feast
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My dear old dad started it. A crazy Easter Sunday egg hunt tradition in which he scrawled cryptic clues on scraps of paper (in his near illegible hand) and then hid them in absurd places for me and my brother and sisters to find.
He’d leave the first note at the end of one of our beds to find when we woke up and then we’d have to crack that clue in order to find the next, and so on. He’d squirrel the notes away in the washing machine. Or slipped between the pages of a random book. Inside the fridge. Perhaps in a plant pot or a packet of biscuits. Maybe inside one of his shoes.
At the end of this convoluted, frustrating but wildly exciting round of detective work we would, eventually, discover our reward: Easter eggs in their joyful tin-foil shininess. My father’s prize would be a lovely lie-in, as long as he’d made the clues tricky enough for us not to solve too easily, but not so hard that we had to disturb his slumber for hints.
It’s a tradition that my siblings and I have continued with our own kids. Over the years, late into the Saturday night before Easter Sunday, my hubby and I would be found devising the clues. Often, we’d have left it to the last minute, so this vital and trickier-than-it-sounds task had to be accomplished after a long evening on the wine.
The challenge has always been to hide the clues somewhere ludicrous, and it’s become harder as the kids have grown older and smarter. Sadly, this is the first Easter in 20 years that we won’t be doing our Easter egg hunt. (Yes, we’ve continued them well into our children’s young adulthood). My daughter has to work, so she won’t be at home with us, and it would be unforgivable to have one without her.
We’re not a religious family, but I love all the Easter traditions: our egg hunt, eating too much chocolate, hot cross buns slathered in marmalade and lamb.
This year, probably because our oldest is not with us, we’re giving our Easter feast a new lease of life. We’ll be enjoying it on the Monday with pals instead of the Sunday, and going for something different in the sheep department. I’ll be slow cooking a special shoulder of mutton known as Cull Yaw. You might have heard of it, as it’s been on the menu of some Britain’s finest restaurants over the past few years.
It’s a term commonly used in Cornwall to refer to a cull ewe, a sheep no longer suitable for breeding. In the UK, any sheep older than two years is considered mutton but this meat is from animals aged seven years or more. As you can imagine, it’s extraordinary. We got ours from Piper’s Farm, and you can read all about it here. And I've deliberately ordered lots ,so there will be plenty of leftovers.
Sometimes we veer away from leftovers because we think we don't want to eat the same thing more than once in quick succession. But this won’t apply if you have this week’s recipe up your sleeve. It’s from my latest book, Second Helpings and transforms surplus cooked meat into something that tastes entirely different from the way it did first time around.
In this recipe, you crisp up cooked lamb (or beef) and then bathe it in an intense tangy sauce, while lentils bulk out the stew deliciously. In fact, if you're short on meat, just add more lentils. The recipe includes a creamy white bean mash spiked with preserved lemons to serve it with. Just finely grate some lemon zest into the mash if you don’t have preserved lemons to hand. It’s incredibly delicious and quick to make.
Happy Easter to you all, and may your easter egg hunt - if you’re lucky enough to have one - be merry.