We had our neighbours to dinner last night. Tom and Wyn are in their late 70s. Tom is Irish. He moved to Australia in his teens, worked all over the country and then bought land here at Bilambil where he grew bananas and ran about 600 chickens. He sold a lot of the land and now has a small parcel of bananas. Wyn comes from Terranora across the valley where her family owned a dairy farm. We enjoy their company and especially listening to stories of the region many years ago. I thought I would do something simple. Lamb cutlets seemed like a good idea. For those of you overseas, we have had some pretty horrendous floods here. Roughly a fifth of Australia - about a fifth of mainland USA - under water. Apart from loss of lives and homes, many farms have also been inundated. Topsoil was washed into the sea. Feed and crops have disappeared. Transport has come to a standstill. The net result is that shelves are empty of fresh food and the food that is available is becoming very expensive. These cutlets were more expensive than usual - and things will get worse over the next months. My mum comes from a farming family. At 84, a lot of her cooking now is simple fare - what you might call country cooking. One dish that she cooks frequently is layers of onion and tomato covered in breadcrumbs and butter and baked. I had some flageolet beans I had cooked a couple of days ago and so I thought I would do a similar dish with the beans as the dominant ingredient. Want to try it? Put some fine slices of good butter (Lescure, Lurpak) on the bottom of a dish, spread slices of onion, some cooked flageolet beans, slices of tomato, more beans and more onion. Sprinkle breadcrumbs over the top (I used panko crumbs), season with salt and pepper and top with more butter. Bake at about 170C for an hour.
LAMB CUTLETS WITH FLAGEOLETS GRATINEE
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