Slow roast parchment wrapped shoulder of lamb with honey, lemon & thyme

Honey. What a delicious and wonderfully sustainable resource, not to mention natural and chock full of good stuff for the body. But anyone who has tried to roast with it will be well aware of the big down side of any ingredient that is so rich in sugar - burning. Nothing can be quite so depressing as to open the oven and find that your juicy succulent roast, which was supposed to be full of fragrant and subtle flavours, has been pockmarked by acrid black spots which means that even if the roast is salvageable, your gravy surely won't be.

Of course the obvious answer to this malady is just don't use honey or similar in the first place, but I love the stuff, and it's a natural partner for many meats. So the next step is to find a method that somehow keeps the rich flavours but avoids the burning - which is where the parchment wrapping comes in. Sealing meat in some form of protective wrapping is a long revered tradition, whether it's really old school such as wrapping in an (inedible) pastry, or more contemporary such as the latest sous vide techniques. Either way, you need to find a way of keeping the ingredients that have a tendency to burn, away from the direct heat of the oven.

I've done a few parchment wraps so far, mostly lamb, but this is the first that included honey. Lamb is already a sweet meat, but there's something special about the combination of lamb and honey. Thyme again is a natural accompaniment, and at this time of year it's really at its best, with long tender new growth full of flavour. Lemon I feel is often a good idea with fat and strong meat such as lamb, as it cuts through that richness, and also marries very well with the other two ingredients.

This is also a slow roast, as I believe this is the best way to treat a shoulder of lamb, as it breaks down any tough meat into meltingly tender strips, and the natural fattiness of the lamb ensures that it remains juicy even after hours of cooking. It also means that although I have to spend a little time at the very beginning of the day preparing the meat, I have the rest of the morning to myself to do other things, in this case wandering through the Exe Valley watching trains and paddling in the river Exe with my family. Lots of fun :-)

The Recipe

The first step with this is to blend together them ingredient to coat the shoulder of lamb. This should be a whole shoulder on the bone, though off the bone should work fine too. Take 2 tablespoons or so of honey, the same of chopped thyme, and blend with half a lemon - both rind and juice. Add a teaspoon of salt (flaky sea in my case) and pepper to taste if you like it - I didn't in this case.

The coating for the meat - honey, lemon, thyme and salt

Line a roasting dish with some baking parchment ready to fold, and place the meat on it. Now pour the mix over the meat and ensure it's well covered. Don't worry about the underside, it'll all come out in the wash!

The meat covered in the mix

Now wrap up the meat securely in parchment, using several layers to ensure all the juices stay in. I did mine several layers one way, ands then added another load of baking parchment 90° to the first lot.

The meat wrapped up ready for the oven

Now bake this in the oven for four hours at 150°C (fan). You should end up with something like this.

The finished dish

I poured some of the juices out of the wrap at this stage so I could then reheat them and serve with the meat on the table, as the meat was going to rest for half an hour and I wanted to bring some heat back to the dish.

It's a light summer way of preparing a large piece of lamb like this, and comes our very tender. I did get a little blackening in the pan itself where some juices had managed to leak out, so I could have perhaps sealed the parchment more, but on the whole this is a very effective way of using honey in a long slow roast and being able to retain flavour without burning. Served this with potatoes and carrots, as that's what I had to hand, but honestly I think it would be much better accompanied by bread and salad.

One curious point to finish on, even though this was sealed throughout the cooking, you'll notice that there is still some blackening inside the wrapping. Where this had cooked the thyme, honey and lemon glaze the result was outstanding, creating crispy biscuits of herb flavoured honeyed lamb skin. An expected benefit!

You can see the whole album for Slow roast parchment wrapped shoulder of lamb with honey, lemon & thyme on my Google+ profile if you're interested.

Farfalle with Broad Beans, Bacon, Red Onion & Thyme

Not strictly a Sunday roast this, but it's one of my own inventions that's good enough for sharing I think. I tend to be an inventive cook ... but as with all inventions, not everything is worth sharing, believe me! I wanted to go for a bit of a photo recipe this time around, as I'm aware I can be a bit lax with measurements - hopefully the photos make up for it.

I first knocked this together a few years back when we started to grow our own broad beans. It was one of those classic "what can I cook with these leftovers" dishes, when all I had was a ton of fresh broad beans, a few bits and pieces in the fridge, and plenty of summer sunshine. It's simplicity itself to make - the secret of all good Italian food, but relies on excellent quality ingredients in the correct proportions - that's the other secret to Italian cooking, and the one that most people tend to overlook.

Fresh broad beans, ready for cooking

Now in truth I'm not brilliant at measuring ingredients - unless I'm baking I tend to play it very much by eye/nose/whatever. I can't give exact proportions here, but hopefully the pictures will give you a clear idea of just how much of everything you'll need if you wanted to try and replicate this dish.

Ingredients

• Farfalle pasta (the little bows)
• Broad beans (cooked and shelled unless very fresh)
• Streaky bacon (I prefer mine unsmoked, but that's a matter of personal preference)
• Red onion, thiny sliced
• Fresh thyme
• Lemon zest
• A little white wine (optional really)
• Creme fraiche

Some of the ingredients

Preparation

First off prepare the thyme and lemon. I love thyme - well, I love all herbs to be honest! - so am very generous, but add as much as you think you'd like to eat. The lemon zest should be done lengthways to give a little texture as well as flavour, and the thyme simply needs to be pulled off the woody stems.

Lemon Zest and Thyme

Now the broad beans. Cook the de-podded beans by boiling in salted water for about 8-10 minutes or so, depending how large they are, and then leaving them to cool slightly. You're trying to get a very slight al dente type bean, doesn't matter if some are firm as they will be reheated again. Slip off the outer skin once cool, which should come off nice and easily, and put the lustrous green bean halves to one side.

Cooking broad beans - two different varieties here, hence the different colours

The cooked beans. These have been added to the Thyme/Lemon mix as this will all be added back in to the pan at the same time

Next get some onion cooking. You're looking for quite a sweet finish, so the onions are going to need to cook in a mixture of olive oil and butter for at least 15 minutes in order to sweeten. Whilst they're cooking put a large pan of salted water on to boil for the pasta.

Onions cooking, these are about half way there

Now the bacon. Once the onions are cooked take them out of the pan, and add in the bacon chopped into strips. No need for extra oil or butter as the fat from the bacon itself will soon cook down and do the job for you. Crispier the better in my book, but cook to taste. When the bacon is about half way there, you'll need to get the pasta in the water. Different farfalle's will take different lengths of time, but for an average farfalle cooking time of 10 minutes now is the right time.

Farfalle pasta

Once the bacon is crispy, it's time for the rest of the ingredients to go back in. Add back in the onions and the broad bean, thyme and lemon mixture.

Bacon, onion, broad beans, thyme and lemon back in the pan

Once this comes back to temperature deglaze with a splash of white wine if you like, cook off some of the liquid, and then add in a good dollop or two of creme fraiche.

Adding in creme fraiche

You should end up with quite a loose sauce, ready to dress the pasta with.

All the sauce ingredients mixed together

Season well with salt & pepper, and add the pasta to the sauce (or should you add the sauce to the pasta? I'm never convinced by either camp if I'm honest) and you're done.

Pasta just added to the sauce, ready to mix

Top tip for pasta here - when you're draining it, always try and keep a little of the water from the pasta back in the pan. You can then use this liquid to loosen the sauce if you're accidentally let either the sauce or the cooked pasta get a little too dry.

Once you're ready either serve the past straight, or you can add a little more thyme and some parmesan for that finishing touch. I also like a couple of Bibanesi on the side, but that's not something you can easily get in the UK

The finished dish

A scrumptious light summer lunch, full of seasonal freshness and healthy to boot. What more could you want?

Roast Chicken with Basil & Lemon (with HD video!)

Bought a chicken on Saturday, but for the life of me couldn't decide what to do with the thing. I love to roast chicken, but it can get a bit repetitive. Was gazing out of the kitchen window, wondering, and my eyes came to rest on the trough of basil that we've been growing over the summer, and I suddenly remembered an old favourite that I'd not done for years.

It's as simple as they come - just take a lemon, halve it, give it a bit of crush in your hands and then stick it into the chicken cavity. Then try to cram in as much fresh basil as you can get into the space that remains! As the chicken roasts the perfume (an odd word to use, maybe, but appropriate I think) of the basil penetrates the meat, but not overpoweringly so, it just adds another dimension to the meat. The lemon meanwhile gives a slight citric tang, and melds with the juices that the chicken exudes as it roasts to create a wonderfully light and summery gravy.

I cooked this for about an hour, but it was a small chicken. Here's the video I made during the cooking (not the most glamorous camera angle I have to say, but then again I've not got the most glamorous body :-):



Served this with our runner beans and some dauphinois (looking for that cream/lemon contrast), along with some focaccia I'd made the day before.

And then there are the leftovers ... what's great about this dish is that you get all that basil flavour still in the meat. I just grabbed a bite from the fridge, and it was gorgeous, but then again I'm a big basil fan. If you like basil, give this a try, I guarantee you'll not be disappointed!


See more roast chicken at Foodista:

Roast Chicken wild Wild Garlic & Lemon

Just trying something new - video blogging! Probably needs some work, but fun none the less.

Part 1: Preparation

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Part2: Gravy & Cabbage/Pancetta

Part 3: The finished dish

Roast Chicken with Goats Cheese & Wild Garlic

Well it's been an interesting few weeks roasting and boiling things. Top of the list has to be the famed Italian Bollito Misto which I've been itching to try for ages, and finally got round to the other week when my bro came down with his family. To be honest it wasn't all I had hoped for though, although I wasn't in the best of health and it's never a good idea to try and cook when you're not feeling great. I think I might have to revisit it another time though - ever since I actually had it in Italy I've been captured by how wonderful something so simple can be.

But back to last weekend and the title of this blog post. Ever since I did the turkey at Christmas, pushing butter and the skin to keep the bird moist, I've been eager to repeat the process and to try some more experiments. Thinking of what to cook this Sunday I decided to have a try with some goats cheese that needed eating, a free range chicken, and the now almost obligatory wild garlic.


The ingredients lined up ready to go


Getting your fingers between the breasts of the bird and it's skin is a doddle really, although maybe once you've done a turkey a chicken isn't a challenge! I decided the goats cheese wasn't enough by itself though (I used a crumbly Vulscombe with herbs) so mixed it ahead of time with some soft cheese and salt & pepper just to increase the fat content. It was going to get pretty hot after all. This went under the skin and then a good handful of wild garlic and about a quarter of a lemon inside the cavity.


The bird with the cheese mixture under the skin, seasoned and stuffed.

Then into a fan oven at 180°C for 15 mins per pound plus 15 mins (timing that I've worked out is good my oven, but as ever for this sort of thing your oven might be different).


Roasting away - about half-way through now.



And finally out of the oven, ready to rest for 20 minutes or so.

I served this with oven baked rosemary & garlic potato wedges and purple sprouting broccoli with a hot red wine vinaigrette. The broccoli was a little overcooked, but the vinaigrette came out really well, which I'd lightly spiced with cayenne pepper. Saw something vaguely similar on Saturday kitchen the morning before so thought I'd give it a whirl myself.


All plated up and ready for munching.


So how did it work out? Pretty good really. I thought the residue from the chicken pan was going to be too burnt at first to use for gravy, but it was actually really delicious, and the everything worked very well together. Opened a bottle of Beaujolais to drink and then was great too, in fact everything was kind of just right for the season, a real taste of spring. This whole "let's shove something under the skin of the bird and see what happens" lark could become a minor obsession with me I think!

Chicken with Lemon & Oregano

It's easy to feel that going back to chicken is a bit of a cop-out come Sunday lunch, but the thing with chicken is it's just so versatile and tasty. I think every time I do it I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to do it, but then pretty much every time it comes out great anyway - don't know why I bother worrying really!

I long ago gave up buying cheap chicken, waste of time that stuff really even without worrying about the conditions that most birds are raised in. Flavour is enough of an argument to get me to switch, but these days I do try and be a bit more vigilant in other chicken products that I pick-up. That's what the 'Chicken Out' campaign has taught me if nothing else, that the buggers will try and stick cheap, nasty, exploitative food in anything given half a chance. That tasty looking chicken madras, a quick chicken bap down town for lunch, even those biscuits you've been buying for years. Turns out they put battery reared food in lots of stuff. Anyhow, enough carping on about that. Back to the food.

This recipe was inspired by the fact that I had most of a lemon knocking about in the back of fridge looking to be finished up, and some left over new potatoes that weren't quite as fresh as they could have been - sometimes the smallest things can inspire good cooking. The lemon went inside the chicken cut into about eight pieces along with a couple of garlic cloves, and the potatoes were scattered around the bird along with a large cut up onion. Then the whole thing was liberally seasoned scattered with oregano and then finally some olive oil. Then into the oven for the usual sort of time whilst we went down the pub.

The chicken before going in the oven

The idea with this style of cooking, something I've been doing for many years now although usually with lamb, is that the juices from the meat and the oil will combine and the potatoes will get covered in all this extra flavour but also start to caramelise and crisp up a bit. It works a treat and so long as your roasting time is not too long your vegetables will get that extra depth and sweetness to them. The onions this time around were particularly wonderful, somehow tart and sweet, soft and chewy, all at the same time.

Served this with broad beans - our first crop from the mini-allotment at the end of the garden - together with some pancetta that we had in the fridge from B's village back home in Italy. The beans were very quickly boiled whilst I rendered off the fat from the pancetta. Most of the fat was put aside and then the beans and bacon (what a classic combination that is) just tossed together - no seasoning at all, didn't need it.

The chicken once roasted

I thought this need a little extra something so made some focaccia bread to go with it. Turns out the flour I used was brown, which I wasn't expecting (it was local flour from down the road we hadn't tried before) so instead of the usual rosemary focaccia I make I turned this into fennel focaccia instead, and it turned out pretty good and a good foil for the strong flavours of the bird.

Fennel Focaccia

All in all a damn good feed, and what with some untypical English Sunday Summer Sunshine (!) added some much needed sanity into what has lately been a bit of a demanding life.

Lunch is served!

You can see more pictures of this dish on my Facebook profile:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=43606&l=740ff&id=609271849

The Best of Both Worlds: Lamb Fast & Slow

Spring lamb is here and whilst I love older meat there is something enticing about it. This Easter I decided to try and emulate a dish I had at River Cottage with it - lamb cooked slow and lamb cooked fast.

I bought two pieces from my local butcher (Dave Haggett of Silverton - fab place, as recommended by Rick Stein on his Food Heroes programmes) both about a kilo - a half shoulder and half leg. The shoulder was set on red onion slices and rosemary and done in a low over for over 2 hours. The leg was with lemon and olive oil and roast hot and fast. Whilst both were resting I then took juices from both pans, deglazed, passed through a sieve to get all that onion & rosemary flavour out and on the plate.

The result was pretty special, and I think will become a regular on the table. The addition of lots of rosemary and onion to the shoulder really penetrated the meat after all that long slow cooking (I did use four quite large rosemary sprigs, but then I love the stuff). The lemon on the leg just started to burn a bit and gave that lovely charcoal effect here and there. On the plate these two ways of cooking lamb worked really well together, and whilst either would be nice by themselves the contrast was a real pleasure. Nobody could decide which they liked better in the end!

You might think it would be much more work to do this, but in actual fact because both roasts were so simple it didn't take much. I think I spent most time reading the paper, not cooking. I did serve this with wild garlic dauphinois, which went well but also meant that they could be prepared early too and just sit alongside the slow shoulder in the same oven - nice and easy. For vegetables it was spinach again with wild garlic - well there's just do much wild garlic around right now and it tastes so good why not use it I reckon.

On that note we have wild garlic pesto in the fridge again - if you haven't tried it you're missing a trick. It's fab stuff, just take a standard pesto recipe and swap the basil for the garlic and don't bother with any garlic cloves - you might need a bit more parmesan/pecorino than usual though to offset the sharpness, and perhaps even a little cream to add sweetness. It can be a bit metallic. It's lovely on fresh pasta for a quick lunch or perhaps on the side of some simply grilled fish.

No pictures today I'm afraid as no camera!

Moroccan Lamb

Just looking back through some old photos (at some point in the past I thought I would start keeping a photo record of what I cooked, but that didn't last for long) and found some nice shots of a Moroccan lamb recipe that I did some time ago. For once I actually remembered to do before and after pictures:

(you can see the chef has had a sneaky glass of wine already)

This leg of lamb was marinated overnight in lemon and saffron, plus others spices and oils, and I served it with spinach:

I'm a sucker for dishes like this - more or less one pot cooking, with everything pretty much ready in one dish, and loads of great flavours melding together into one. That lamb may look a little dry but believe me it wasn't, and the juices from the cooking made for an instant gravy.

A lot of recipes with legs of lamb suggest puncturing the meat and inserting slices or garlic or rosemary, which I've never been happy about doing and have stopped now, especially after one particularly dry result. I can't think of a better way to dry out a piece of meat than stick a knife all over it, and fail to see the point - you can get plenty of flavour on your plate without this technique. And why just lamb? You don't see anyone recommending it for beef, chicken or pork now. I think it's just become a habit, and to my mind can easily make a nice piece of meat far too garlic and herb ridden. OK, rant over!

Another recipe very similar to this one is the old English way of taking a leg of mutton to the butchers of a Sunday morning, and there's an Italian variant too - but more of them another time.