
Our Local Harvest – Eat with the Seasons
We love food at The Lint Mill! Our love of food was one of the motivating factors in moving to our smallholding. When we lived in the city, Colin had a wonderfully productive half plot allotment near Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens but over time, we aspired to growing more than just vegetables.
We have always eaten meat and the provenance of our meat really matters to us, so we would buy expensive organic meat less often rather than regularly buying cheaper meat of uncertain origin. We began to wonder what it would be like to raise our own livestock for meat, then we could be certain just exactly what quality of life our animals had in order to feed us.
Alongside this love of good food comes our real love of cooking. We are both enthusiastic cooks and take great pleasure in preparing meals for friends who come for dinner and for our B&B guests. We are sometimes asked for ‘sample menus’, so this blog explains our approach to the food that reaches your table.
We are guided by the turning of the seasons and all our menu planning is based around what is good from the kitchen garden during the gardening year as well as when we have our various kinds of home reared meat available.
What we don’t grow or rear ourselves is sourced locally, we believe in keeping ‘food miles’ as low as possible. We are lucky to have a friend who supplies us with game from his shoots in the local area and another friend who brings us fresh fish caught off Crail on the east coast of Fife.
The only thing we don’t do is dairy and despite the allure of having a ‘house cow’, for now our organic milk and cream is from Clyde Organics, Carnwath.
So, here is The Lint Mill food year with some sample menus for each season.
Spring
In January and February, two of the bleaker months in the garden, our recipes will often use cabbages, evergreen herbs and winter salads. In early spring cauliflowers, purple sprouting broccoli, rhubarb, and spinach begin to feature. Then comes May and June with the first broad beans, crunchy salads, new potatoes, peas, radishes, and early strawberries from the polytunnel.
Spring menus also feature The Lint Mill pork. Over the winter we raise a rare traditional breed called the Oxford Sandy and Black. The OSB is lighter boned than many other breeds so it produces a good ratio of meat to bone. It is also less inclined to put on excess fat than some breeds. We raise them on grassland, feed organic GM and additive free food to ensure they have the right balance of vitamins and minerals and supplement their diet with fresh vegetables everyday which we are given from The Orchard, the greengrocer in Biggar. They get treats of apples, pears, tomatoes, mushrooms and the occasional avocado every afternoon (they love to crunch the avocado stones!).
Our pigs are totally outdoor reared, free to root naturally and are encouraged to develop slowly to improve the texture and the taste of the meat. Our pork at The Lint Mill is unlike any we have ever tasted, a darker meat with delicious flavour.
We keep a laying flock of hens, mainly Cream Legbars (who lay the beautiful pale blue eggs), Leghorns, Welsummers and some hybrids. Delicious free range organically fed hens eggs, with their gaudily yellow yolks, can be found on our menus throughout the year.
So here is a typical spring menu:
Broad Bean Crostini
Slow Roast Aromatic Shoulder of Lint Mill Pork with seasonal vegetables
Lint Mill free-range Eggs Florentine (v)
Rhubarb Clafoutis with crème fraiche
Regional farmhouse cheese* & handmade oatcakes
Coffee & homemade Scottish tablet or Pukka herbal teas
Summer
Spring is followed by our main harvesting period during high summer with recipes for beetroot, summer berries, courgettes, cucumber, edible flowers, French and runner beans, gooseberries, herbs, carrots, onions, garlic, raspberries and of course tomatoes.
As we breed our own Cream Legbar hens, we also raise the cockerels for the pot, so free range organically fed chicken features year-round on our menus.
Zucchini carpaccio
Lint Mill free-range chicken Moroccan baked with lemons, chickpeas and rice
Lemon risotto with basil (v)
Chocolate Raspberry Pavlova
Regional farmhouse cheese* & handmade oatcakes
Coffee & homemade Scottish tablet or Pukka herbal teas
Autumn
Autumn brings the small and precious apple, pear and plum harvest from our fledgling orchard, glossy aubergines, fennel, celery, chillies, peppers, sweetcorn (if we’ve had sufficient sun to ripen the cobs) from the polytunnel, hedgerow fruits such as rowan, sloes, and brambles, maincrop potatoes, local mushrooms, and of course, pumpkins and squashes.
The Lint Mill Shetland lamb, born in spring is ready by the autumn. It is classic Shetland lamb, tender and succulent with a delicate, slightly sweet flavour, and the naturally lean quality of the meat is attained from the animals foraging over the hilly paddocks of our smallholding. The rough grazing of our pasture at The Lint Mill means we produce what Shetlanders would call ‘park fed lamb.’
Autumn is also our time for preserving. Colin is passionate about producing delicious jams and chutneys. He is always on the look out for unusual recipes and is a keen forager of the local hedgerows as well as using our own fruit and vegetables for preserving. His Redcurrant and Mint Jelly is a particularly delicious accompaniment to our Shetland lamb.
Warm lentil salad with walnuts and goat’s cheese
The Lint Mill autumn Shetland Lamb cutlets Shrewsbury with seasonal vegetables
Moroccan pumpkin couscous with a prune and onion confit (v)
Apple & Walnut Crumble with homemade vanilla ice cream
Regional farmhouse cheese* & handmade oatcakes
Coffee & homemade Scottish tablet or Pukka herbal teas
Winter
Finally, the winter vegetables, Brussels sprouts, chard, kale, leeks, and winter roots make an appearance on our menus, together with local game and delicious hearty casseroles. Puddings are often created from our stored apples and pears together with some good old fashioned nursery favourites like Queen of Puddings with our own raspberry preserve and bread and butter pudding with chunky homemade marmalade.
French Onion Soup with Gruyère Croutons
Pot Roasted Dykefoot Farm Partridge with juniper berry stuffing
and seasonal vegetables
Kale & mushroom lasagne (v)
Bread and Butter Pudding with homemade marmalade and fresh custard
Regional farmhouse cheese* & handmade oatcakes
Coffee & homemade Scottish tablet or Pukka herbal teas
We always serve a selection of Scottish cheese to end the meal. The climate and geography of Scotland are well suited to cheese-making. At one time most farmhouses or crofts made their own cheese, and we choose to serve local farmhouse cheeses who are inspired by this tradition.
Gorgeously creamy with a soft, long, blue mellowness. Each flavour is distinct but perfectly poised, before a stunningly long aftertaste.
Region: Carnwath, Lanarkshire
Taste Notes: Strong, complex blue with long finish. Texture: Blue
Type of Milk: Cow Treatment: Unpasteurised Rennet: Vegetarian
Grimbister Farm Cheese
A traditional style of highland cheese. Moist and crumbly with a light, zesty flavour comparable to Wensleydale.
Region: Kirkwell, Orkney
Taste Notes: Crumbly mild, salty cheese Texture: Hard
Type of Milk: Cow Treatment: Unpasteurised Rennet: Vegetarian
A Scottish version of Somerset-style cheddar with a fruity, sharp and very tangy flavour.
Region: Tobermory, Isle of Mull
Taste Notes: Traditional strong, mature cheddar Texture: Hard
Type of Milk: Cow Treatment: Unpasteurised Rennet: Animal
If you’d like to know about The Lint Mill’s approach to producing & cooking food inc. sample menus, check this link https://t.co/AT97yYXxrn