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The last thing Elizabeth’s great-grandfather saw as he left Ireland was the spire of St. Colman’s Cathedral of Cobh, towering above the seawall as he left behind the dark years of famine. Now Elizabeth is the first in her family to return to Ireland—to Ballymaloe Cookery School, where she’ll learn to butcher a sheep and prepare an Irish lamb stew that locals will say is the best they’ve ever had….

Elizabeth is a longtime farmers market customer of ours (you might have met her over in Lamb Pack 1). She rarely ate lamb until she came to Oregon from the Midwest, tasted good-quality lamb raised on grass and forage—and fell in love.

Then in County Cork she honed her lamb cooking skills, and now she can name a way to prepare lamb for most any season: “A great summer dish is lamb chops on the grill. It’s amazing. But sometimes I think of lamb being a spring or fall dish.” A roast leg of lamb for Easter is quintessential. And fall—”Irish stew, lamb pies, roasts of lamb.”

What will Elizabeth make with this grass-fed, grass-finished lamb pack stuffed with 10 lamb loin chops, a beautiful boneless leg of lamb, and fresh ground lamb?

“Mousaka with the ground lamb,” she says. For the boneless leg, she’s roasting it. “Cooking the leg of lamb is just the easiest thing on the planet. Put the fat side up, (because if the fat is on the top, it melts into the meat and keeps your meat moist). Add herbs… and have at it.”

For the lamb chops, it’s Irish stew. While at Ballymaloe Cookery School, Elizabeth prepared a beautiful Irish stew for her final project. She had fallen in love with the stew: “It’s really, really good lamb. It’s baby carrots, baby onions, and potatoes,” she says. “You use good stock—I use chicken stock, not lamb stock—[and] lots of fresh parsley on the top. If you have a nice pot, you can just serve it out of the pot.” What did she do with all the extra stew after the final? “I called [new friends] Derry and Mary Allen and said, ‘I have some stew for you. Would you like it?’ They said, ‘We’ll be right over.’

“They had guests for dinner the next night and they served it to their guests. I got notes from people I didn’t know saying how impressed they were and how much they loved it.” “So you were an American cooking some of the best stew their Irish guests had ever had?” we asked. Elizabeth laughed. If you’re near Portland, stop by the Beaverton Farmers Market sometime soon and we’ll introduce you to Elizabeth as she picks up more grass-fed, grass-finished lamb.

About our lamb: Our grass-fed and grass-finished lamb comes from two small, family-run farms near us in the beautiful Willamette River Valley.

In addition, all our meat is processed on-site at our USDA-inspected processing facility. It’s rare for a family farm to have the ability to process on site, and it’s something that we’ve worked hard for, ensures the highest quality of our cuts, and allows us to support other small Oregon farmers.