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.