Lamb neck stew with onions, white beans and gremolata

Serves c.6

3 neck fillets
5 onions, sliced thickly across grain
2 bay leaves
1/2 btl dry white wine
2 tsp anchovy paste (or 2 anchovy fillets, chopped)
1 large jar butter beans
1 tin borlotti beans
Squeeze lemon juice

Garlic, parsley, lemon zest

Brown meat well, cut into 1.5cm bits.  Sweat onions in oil and butter until golden/yellowed.  Deglaze lamb pan with wine, add all to onions.  Add the bay leaves and anchovy paste, season lightly and cook on a very low heat for 2.5 hrs.  Add beans, gently simmer with beans 45 mins, finish with lemon juice. Generous pepper.

Chop gremolata ingredients separately then stir together - chop lemon zest after grating it also.  Better if parsley is dry first.  Serve stew not too hot and sprinkle gremolata on top just before serving.

Shoulder of lamb baked with provencal vegetables

1 shoulder of lamb
4 tomatoes
1 small aubergine
1 orange pepper
1 yellow pepper
3 large onions
4 cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
Handful basil

Slice the vegetables very thickly.  Sit the lamb on the vegetables, layered up as best possible with the basil in between.  Pour some olive oil over the lamb and season very well.  Pour a small glass of water in the tray.

Bake at 210C for 30mins to get the browning going.

Bake another 2 hours uncovered at 150C.  Baste the vegetables if required to prevent burning.

Cover loosely with foil and cook for another 1-2 hours, or as desired, at 150C as before.

Allow to rest before serving with a little olive oil drizzled over.

Pot roast lamb shoulder in pictures

I've done a sort of discussion post on lamb shoulder before, but here it is in pictures.  I wonder which you prefer?!  One easy way with a boned, rolled shoulder.

Rub joint with olive oil, season and brown on the hob.  Add a knob of butter, baste, remove excess fat then roast uncovered for 30mins at 210C, basting and turning after 15 minutes.

Again remove excess fat.  Back on the hob add a head of garlic, sliced horizontally in half with both cut surfaces down, to brown briefly.

Add some rosemary and a glass of dry white wine and simmer briefly to drive off the alcohol.  Cover and place back in the oven at 140C for between 3 and 5 hours.  Too long may slightly dry out the meat.  Prodding the meat with a fork is the way to see if it is tender.

Remove the meat to a board to carve.  Spoon out the garlic, rosemary and again the excess fat.  Add a small glass of water and simmer to bring the sauce together.  A gravy jug with a spout that pours from the bottom helps to avoid oil-slicking your plate.

Done!  Here served with green beans and mash.  Mint sauce recipe is in the leg of lamb post from April 2012.  I wish I'd taken a photo with the mint sauce and redcurrant jelly actually but never mind... it tasted good.

Obvious thing to do with the leftovers.  You can chop the meat with a knife and be sure to add the leftover gravy to the sauce.  The mash should not be too runny and if you roughen the surface with a fork and spoon over melted butter that works well too.  Leftover mint sauce in the peas.  Easy.

Roast leg of lamb with sauce soubise

Roast Leg of Lamb

Take your leg of lamb out of the fridge well in advance to come up to room temperature.  Massage with olive oil, season well and place in a roasting tray.  Squeeze over just a small amount of lemon juice.

The only way I now have confidence roasting large joints to be served pink is with a thermometer that is inserted into a thick part of the joint, not too close to a bone, and that stays in the joint in the oven with a wire connecting to a display outside.

Roast for 20 minutes at 220C then remove from the oven.  Add a knob of butter to the tray which will melt, then baste the meat with this mixture of oil and butter.  After basting remove excess fat from the tray to a mug (seems illogical but works) for later bastings, if desired.  Add a large glass of dry white wine to the tray, a whole head of garlic, sliced across horizontally and both cut surfaces facing down, and several sprigs of rosemary.

Place the roast back into a lower temperature oven, say 180C, to finish cooking.  When the thermometer display reads 58C, remove the tray from the oven and the joint from the tray onto a plate to rest for 20 minutes.  The temperature will continue to rise considerably in the centre of the joint, and perfectly pink is around 65C.

Re-place the tray into the oven for five minutes for some additional crusting of the garlic.  Then place on a hob to scrape together all juices into a sauce.  Add a tiny splash of water if required and you may like to transfer the tray contents into a small saucepan to reduce, and by simmering emulsify, before serving.

Mint Sauce

Simmer 50ml of water and 1 (proper) teaspoon of caster sugar in a very small saucepan for 1 minute.  Pour into a serving bowl.  Add 2 tablespoons of very finely chopped fresh mint and 1 teaspoon of red wine vinegar.  Stir well and leave to cool.

Sauce Soubise

Simon Hopkinson's lovely sauce soubise recipe is available here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/all-the-tricks-of-the-trade-625970.html?pageToolsFontSize=200%25

Redcurrant Jelly

As well.  Home-made if you are very lucky.

Braised lamb shoulder

Cooking a lamb shoulder is, at its most basic, extremely straightforward.  All you have to do is take a whole shoulder, on the bone, massage with oil and seasoning and place it in a tray in an oven at 160C for 5 hours, pouring in a cup of water and covering with tin foil half way through.  Rest for 15 minutes out of the oven, carve (vaguely), pour the juices from the tray, less most of the fat, over the meat and serve with couscous, green beans and minty yoghurt.  In an Aga you could roast it for 40 minutes in the bottom right oven then covered well overnight in the top left.

If you wanted to make a proper jus from the braise you would have to be only slightly more attentive.  One excellent variation is to braise the shoulder in a large casserole pot with white wine, peeled whole garlic cloves and rosemary, again in the oven, with the lid slightly ajar.  Allow the braising juices to almost dry out many times, topping up with a small amount of water each time.  Keep going until the neighbours come round to ask where that unbelievable smell is coming from.  Brown the shoulder on all sides over the hob before placing into the oven.  Roast uncovered for 45 minutes initially at which point the fat should be drained off and the other ingredients added.  Cover tightly for the final hour or two to steam the meat to perfection, and serve with mashed potatoes, green beans again, redcurrant jelly and mint sauce.  Get a butcher to cut the joint into two pieces if it won't fit in the casserole pot. 

Finally, this is a simple way to treat those little packets of boned, rolled half lamb shoulders sold in small urban supermarkets, for one or two people.  Cut off the string, un-roll the joint and again massage with oil and season.  Place a roasting tray over a heat source and lay the lamb onto this, skin side down, until the skin is nicely crisp and browned.  Turn over then place into the oven at 175C for 2 hours.  Remove the lamb to a board to rest briefly, pour off any fat from the tray and place the pan back over the hob.  Scrape up the browning juices with a splash of white wine to make a jus, cut down through the lamb with a sharp knife to carve and serve.  I promise you if you do this it will be extremely delicious.

Lamb stew with olives and artichokes, parslied new potatoes

The availability of new potatoes in our shops seems to overlap with the stew time of year, and they make a nice alternative to mash.  So here is a tasty stew recipe to serve with parslied potatoes.  Many supermarkets are now selling boneless lamb shoulder, which is obliging.  Once boned and cubed it becomes easier to trim the shoulder of excess fat, which can sometimes create an off note in a braise.  If you can make the stew ahead of time so much the better, as like all cooked tomato dishes it will mature if left in the fridge for a few days.  I think new potatoes are best steamed.

Parslied potatoes

New potatoes, butter, parsley, salt, pepper

Steam the potatoes for 40 mins (depending on size) then toss in butter, salt, pepper and copious amounts of finely chopped parsley, in the hot saucepan.  Flat leaf parsley leaves can be plucked easily from stems held together in a bunch.  Curly is fine to use also, and use the stalks in a bouquet garni.

Lamb stew with olives and artichokes

This is a typical stew so do improvise around the theme!

 

Cubed boneless lamb shoulder, pancetta, 1 glass dry white wine, 1 can italian tomatoes, 2 onions, coarsely chopped, 3 cloves garlic, 1tbsp flour, 2 carrots, a halved celery stick, leek and the parsley stalks tied in a bundle (a bouquet garni), handful green and black olives, a tin or jar of prepared artichokes, lemon juice

In a casserole dish, brown then remove the pancetta.  In the fat, brown the lamb meat then remove also.  Pour off excess fat into a bowl, then sweat the onions in some olive oil, scraping up the residues with a wooden spoon until light brown.  Add the garlic and sweat briefly.  Return meat to the pan with the juices they will have leaked, add the flour and stir for 1min to cook the flour.  Add the wine and bring to a simmer, add the tomatoes, bouquet garni, thickly sliced carrots, olives and artichokes.  Don’t season with salt as there may be plenty in the artichokes and olives.  Simmer very gently, covered, for around three hours, in the oven or on the hob.  Remove the bouquet garni, simmer uncovered if it needs to reduce, and add lemon juice to taste.  Lemon juice counteracts and balances saltiness.  Add ground black pepper at this stage also, as it turns bitter if cooked for long.  Serve with the potatoes and greens.