Sharing a delicious Christmas goose with loved ones fits in perfectly with the latest fashion to eat well and share hearty meals with friends and family.
Sweet by Yotam Ottolenghi, Nigella Lawson’s At My Table: A Celebration of Home Cooking, Crave by Martha Collison, Milly’s Real Food by Nicola Millbank, and our personal favourites The Meat Cookbook by Nichola Fletcher, and Meat and Game by Tom Kitchin are all best-selling cookery titles from 2017 which lean towards a more fulfilling “get your friends around the table and eat up” kind of vibe.
In 2016 and early 2017 everyone was talking about going sugar free, eating less meat, convincing carnivores to try vegetarian and vegan cookery, and generally eating to be healthy. It was vegetables, vegetables, vegetables; it was all about self. Now it’s all about everybody.
The fact is this – there is nothing better than getting everybody together around the dining table. Whether it’s a family of four, a couple sitting down at the end of a long day at work, cooking a sumptuous roast to feed the extended family, or getting your friends over to chew the fat and put the world to rights.
There’s a comfort which, as much as we can embrace eating less and healthier, you only get from a sticky rack of ribs, a slow-roasted beef joint, or a calorie-laden sweet and delicious cream-filled dessert.
At Farm2Fork we’re all for eating healthily. We advocate the fact that our meat – 100% grass-fed – is as natural as it gets, and we also believe that eating less meat is better for you. But when you do choose to eat meat you need to make it the very best cut, fed on the very best diet, so that you can enjoy it to the full.
With Christmas around the corner it’s the perfect time to embrace hearty eating and cook warming comfort food, such as wine-braised oxtail, roast beef with all the trimmings, rack of lamb with a redcurrant jus, or a simple roast chicken with crispy skin. With the bigger joints of meat, sharing is a must. Good food calls for people coming together, so the wine and the conversation can flow and everyone can leave feeling full, and happy.
Our suggestion for Christmas day of course is a moist and delicious pasture-raised goose, to bring back a tradition which harks back to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The dark, rich and succulent meat, the crispiest crackling paired with a delicious onion stuffing, unctuous gravy, and all the veg, will make your Christmas table look and smell irresistible and will have you converted for following years.
With the dawn of 2018 comes the promotion of more hearty eating, as the latest cookery books demonstrate. They show us that it’s ok to enjoy our food. Every. Single. Mouthful.
