Lamb, glorious lamb

For the last 130 years sheep farming has been one of the primary sources of income for little Aotearoa. Aotearoa is the Maori name for New Zealand and literally translates to land of the long white cloud. Sheep husbandry obviously began to prevail with the arrival and settlement of pioneers to New Zealand’s shores and grew even further as land was transferred from Maori ownership to settler’s ownership.

Currently NZ is home to 40 million sheep, that’s 10 sheep to each person! And yet for a long while lamb has been an expensive commodity within NZ retail, with most of the grade A meat being sent for export. There has been many a rumour that the lamb you buy in the supermarket is in fact hogget, an older gristlier version of the tender meat.

Yet lamb cookery is as much a part of Kiwi culture as beer drinking, rugby playing, gumboots and stubbies. If you are lucky enough (which usually you are as we subsist on 2 degrees of separation in our tinsy winsy country) you’ll know someone who knows someone who is a farmer, or even just is a farmer. Then you sit back and hope for the offer of dinner or meat.

One such opportunity presented itself to the blog team and here we are with a month full of lamb recipes, enough to delight any red blooded male. Of course since the blog team is predominantly female we also threw in some desserts for good measure.

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