First Fruits and Suet

I promised to warn you if I was going to post on the subject of the late sheep, so that those of a sensitive nature, for whom detail about the butchery and meat production side of things is "too much information" could look away and ignore this post. This is the first of same.

We are in that week between the slaughter date for the sheep and the cutting up or the carcasses after they have been hung for a week, but the need to hang did not apply to hearts, livers and kidneys, so we were able to collect those on Monday. Hearts, livers and the actual kidneys are in the freezer, but the kidneys came back still encased in their fatty 'suet' cauls (coverings) which the butchers often clean off completely. We have been enjoying being able to buy kidneys "in their jackets" locally, which means that some of the caul is left on and this adds beautifully to the flavour, in our opinion, of the cooked kidney.

The whole caul, however, would be way too much fat round your 'meat' so Liz cut away most of it before freezing the kidneys. She 'whizzed' up the resulting hard fat with flour to make cookable suet and we have been enjoying this in a couple of meals which are, in fact, the First 'Fruits' of meat production on this 'farm', our first edible livestock. The suet pud here has the lamb suet crust but contains roast pork (from that enormous joint we featured recently) and an Italian mix of tomato and garlic known as 'sugo'.

The third picture is a traditional Spotted Dick which I was able to advise on from good old School Dinners, when Liz had never met one before and had no idea what to expect or whether this one had come out OK. I assured her that it was indeed, perfect and very nostalgic served with Birds banana custard. What other way is there?