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| Sorry lambs... (look away now) |
Last weekend I was staying in a beautiful village near Salisbury. To thank my hosts, I decided to cook them a meal on the Saturday evening. It had been a roasting hot day which turned into a cool sun dappled evening so whilst the rest of the party sat out on deck chairs sipping wine (proper British style), I made supper.
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| So British |
Thanks to my mother, I’m a ‘bit of this, bit of that’ cook ; an
experimental chef with a firm grounding in the principles of cookery and a
sensitive palate. One of my less interesting party tricks is to taste a dish
and recount its ingredients. I usually then try to reconstruct said dish at
home (always using various cheats – see Flo’s recipes for rigour and decorum
and mine for a more relaxed approach).
My marmalade roast lamb came about by accident when I was stuck
without the usual marinade ingredients for a particularly lovely looking lamb
shoulder and so to do it justice, decided to improvise. In most instances when
improvising with meat I reach for fruit or jams.
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| MEAT!! |
I know that a lot of people aren’t fans of mixing sweet and savoury
but I usually find that when I serve them my concoctions they discover they
enjoy them and had just thought it sounded odd… watch this space for apricot
stuffed chicken thighs and banana and bacon muffins - 2 regular favourites
which I’ll post soon.
I love a roast all year around but I find that the traditional English
roast can be a bit heavy in the summer, so I’ve used seasonal pak choi and
carrots to accompany the lamb, lighten the meal and leave room for desert – a chocolate
torte with raspberry coulis.
This recipe serves 4 or 5 depending on how hungry your guests are. We
had leftovers but not much.
Ingredients:
For the lamb
1.5lb lamb shoulder on the bone
Fresh rosemary sprig
2 garlic cloves
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp course cut marmalade
Pinch rock salt
Corse black pepper
For the pak choi
4 small pak choi or 2 large
Light soy sauce
2 tbsp olive oil
A thumb sized piece of fresh root ginger
For the carrots
1 ½ carrots per person cut into sticks
Acacia honey (easier to use squeezey)
Instructions:
Take your meat out of the fridge approximately ½ hour before it needs
to go into the oven and pre heat to 200 °C. If your oven has electric or fan settings, keep it to electric.
Place your lamb in
a shallow roasting dish, douse with the olive oil and sprinkle the rock salt on
top, crushing it more in your fingers as you go. Rub the salt into the fatty
topside with your hands, then take a sharp knife and make 4-6 incisions
diagonally down the fat so that it runs out of the meat whilst it’s roasting.
I’m not a believer
of cutting all the fat off your roast – where’s the fun in that? If you leave
it on the topside so it crisps up but let the juices run out, you don’t end up
with a chewy fatty roast, but a nice crisp topping to your meat, which will be
more succulent for it. When you cut all the fat off, you risk a dry
school-dinner style affair. Just sayin’.
Quarter your
garlic cloves and insert them into the cuts you’ve made in the fat, then
sprinkle the rosemary on top.
Prepare the
carrots to go in at the same time as your lamb. These should also be placed in
a shallow roasting dish. Then just pour the olive oil and honey over them and
add a little salt.
Your lamb will
need 20 minutes + 20 minutes per lb. You want to take it out, drain the juices
into a pan for gravy and coat the meat in marmalade after the first 20 minutes,
as if the marmalade is in for too long, it’ll burn.
Once the lamb is
done, remove it and the carrots from the oven. The lamb needs 10 minutes to
rest. In this time, you can cook your pak choi.
Cut into squares –
approx 2” x 2”. Grate your ginger and warm the olive oil in a frying pan with a
lid. Place the pak choi and ginger in the pan, add soy sauce and put the lid
on. Keep on a low heat for 3 minutes, then remove the lid, turn the heat up and
keep stirring for another minute.
If you fancy a
light gravy too, add a glug of red wine, 2 tsp of cornflower and 1 tsp soy
sauce to the meat juice. Whisk the cornflower in with a fork, whilst you bring
it to the boil on a high heat, then reduce on a lower heat for 5 minutes.
We already had a chocolate torte chilling in the fridge, so to make it more summery, I whipped up a raspberry coulis accompaniment. This is one of the easiest things to make and always worth it.
You need:
1/2 lemon juice
300g raspberries
2 tbsp caster sugar
1 cup water
Boil all your ingredients up and reduce for 10 minutes on a low heat, sieve out the seeds and reduce again for 5 on the lowest heat you can. Cool on the window ledge and refrigerate or serve hot over vanilla ice cream.
The next day was spent picking fresh tomatoes, playing with lambs and puppies and frolicking in fields - it got a little bit Disney.
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| In the greenhouse |
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| Zzzzzzzzz |
