Eating local is in. Especially if ‘local’ happens to be the fantastic region of Yorkshire! Farmison & Co pride themselves on bringing a taste of the Yorkshire Dales to the tables of world famous kitchens and, more importantly, your kitchen! They sell fantastic meat boxes that show off exactly what makes them special: tender meat, packed full of flavour, with a range of interesting cuts to boot.

Farmison & Co kindly sent us their monthly meat box to try out. Something different always sneaks its way into the box depending upon the month and the season, but here’s what was in the box when it turned up on our doorstep (always an exciting moment!):

• chicken, pork, and tarragon sausages
• skin-on chicken breasts
• diced lamb
• gammon steaks
• pork loin steaks
• beef skewers
• beef burgers

We kicked our week of meat off with the chicken, pork, and tarragon sausages, baking them in the oven with some cherry tomatoes, fresh herbs from our herb garden, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. The sausages were the star of the show, bursting with flavour. The chicken made the sausages even more tender and the tarragon really shone through. These would have been fantastic on the barbecue, with or without some ketchup and a fresh bread bun!

The skin-on chicken breasts were similarly impressive. We had them with a lemon and rosemary sauce, a simple recipe that allowed the quality of the meat to shine through. The chicken was moist without being packed full of water, something you find with cheap chicken, and the skin crisped up brilliantly. We couldn’t believe the size of the chicken breasts; they were very filling and very satisfying!

Moving away from the chicken, the lamb was set to be the highlight of our Wednesday night, and so it proved! We used the diced lamb to make a lean lamb hotpot straight from the minds of the good old Hairy Bikers. The lamb had almost no ‘chew’ to it. In fact, we could have eaten it just with a fork or a spoon. It really was that tender. It came out beautifully in the hotpot and made for a real treat of a midweek meal.

The real star of our meat box week was yet to come, though, and it came in a rather unexpected form. Gammon steaks aren’t strangers to us, but by no means do we eat them regularly. We cooked them simply, in a frying pan with some butter, honey, and wholegrain mustard, and the results were astonishing. The gammon steaks were salty, just teetering on the right side of the barrier between salty and too salty, and as a result were packed full of meaty, porky flavour. They had a really satisfying, ‘chewy in the right way’ texture to them, and took on the sweetness of the honey and mustard sauce really nicely.

The gammon turned out to be our highlight of the meat box, which is one of the appeals of ordering such a box. Not falling back on your default favourites opens you up to new stars of the meat world, and new favourites that stick in the mind for weeks to come!

The pork loin had a hard job following up the gammon steaks, but they kept their tender texture in a rather lovely breadcrumbed pork loin recipe. Again, the addition of some home-grown herbs brought the meat to life, this time rosemary doing its job nicely.

We were a little nervous about the beef skewers. To be honest, we weren’t 100% sure what to do with them! We kept it simple and put them on the grill, and that simple approach really paid off. We cooked them medium, which was surprisingly easy to get right on the grill, and ate them with some Mediterranean veg and barbecue sauce. You could tell the beef came exclusively from grass fed beef sourced from small farms in pristine countryside; it just shone through in the taste.

It was a similar story with the beef burgers. We again grilled them (it wasn’t the weather for a barbecue, sadly) and let them rest for a while after cooking. The result was a burger that was just the right thickness and texture to grill evenly, with the quality of the meat shining through. We topped our burgers with lashings of fried onions and some barbecue sauce, and that was all that was needed to make an exciting weekend meal.

We would definitely order from Farmison & Co again and would specifically recommend the monthly meat box for its variation and the quantity of meat that comes with it. The box would easily feed a family of four for a week, with some left over, and is also perfect for getting the freezer stocked up with goodies. To find out more, check out their full range online.