In praise of lamb - and Julia

One advantage of having my son staying with me at the moment is the good excuse it gives me to have a roast, especially a leg of lamb. They were on special this week and I was having my neighbour round for her regular dinner. She's a real carnivore, and she suffers from that living-alone problem of not having proper roasts, so I knew she'd love it - and so would my son.
          Even on special they still seemed expensive. But when the long knobbly bone finally went into the trash on Tuesday, picked very clean indeed, I worked out exactly how many meals we'd had off that leg (which weighed 2.48 kg).
           Roast dinner for three, cold meat for two twice, rissoles for two twice, and a few lamb sammies for lunch as well. I'm particularly fond of slices of pink roast lamb made into sandwiches with nice soft white bread and a good sprinkling of salt and pepper.
          So the initial layout of $27 covered, let's say, 10 servings of dinner (allowing for the fact that I added a soup and some fritters to eke out the meat here and there) - that's $2.70 per person for meat. Not bad, eh.
          And very delicious it was too. The blog has the recipe I usually use for the roast itself and for those rissoles. But this time I decided to use Julia Child's basic recipe for roast leg of lamb, because I was short of time earlier in the day and didn't want to be bothered with the mustard coating in advance.

It was an interesting exercise. I was intrigued to see that she adds salt and pepper only at the end. This seemed odd, so I did sprinkle a bit over the top of mine just before putting it in the oven. I shoved a few slivers of garlic around the bone too. But of course Julia was originally using the famous French "pré-salé" lamb, which I used to think meant "presalted", but actually means "salt-meadow", the seaside meadows where the lambs graze, absorbing the taste of salt with their grass and herbs. Harvey and I had it once for lunch in Rouen, and it was superb.
            Her recipe is for a 6 pound leg, roughly 2.75 kg, but as I've often found it takes longer in the oven for a roast than she says, even though it's on fan-forced, I thought it would be safe to use the lower times she gives for my 2.48 kg leg (starting at room temperature).  But since you do initially sear it at 230C for 15 minutes, unlike the mustard-coating recipe, that obviously makes it cook quicker for the rest of the time at 180C. An hour was plenty - in fact I would have been happy to have it a little pinker (although I think my neighbour probably preferred the way it turned out, well towards medium rather than rare, though still nice and pink in its deeper recesses). I've left her timings in their original form for the larger leg, but if you're using it for a smaller one, check with a meat thermometer after it's been in the 180C oven for 45 minutes, rather than leaving it for an hour.

Roast leg of lamb - Gigot rôti
(From Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1)

This is for a leg weighing 6 pounds, approximately 2.7 - 2.8 kg bone in.
Remove the lamb from the fridge an hour before cooking. Trim off as much fat and silverskin as possible, and wipe it dry with paper towels.

Preheat the oven to 230C. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter with 2 tablespoons of oil in a glass jug in the microwave, Brush the lamb all over with this mixture.
Place it on a rack in a roasting tin just large enough to fit it. Place the tin in the upper third of the preheated oven. For fan-forced, turn the heat down to 220C. After 5 minutes, turn it over and baste it again with the leftover butter and oil.
Repeat after another 5 minutes, and again after another 5 minutes. Leave the roast after the final turn with its fatty top side uppermost.
Take out the lamb and turn the heat down to 180C. Strew the roughly chopped pieces of 1 large carrot and 1 large onion and a few cloves of peeled garlic in the bottom of the pan. Set lamb in middle of oven and roast till done, with teh correct temperature showing on the meat thermometer. Basting is not necessary.

Cooking times:
Rare: 15 mins searing plus 45 mins to 1 hour at 180C. Juices run rosy red.
Medium: 15 mins searing plus 1 hour to 1 hour 15 mins at 180C. Juices run pale rose.
(Julia does not deign to give any timing for well done, that would be unthinkable.)

Season the lamb with 1 tsp salt and 1/4 ts pepper, and place it on a hot platter. Leave it to rest at room temperature for 30 minutes before carving slices across the grain. (You can wrap it loosely in foil and leave it for longer.)

To make the sauce: Remove the rack from the tin, and spoon out the cooking fat. Pour in a cup of stock (I use miso) and boil rapidly, scraping up the juices and scraps and mashing the vegetables into the stock. Taste for seasoning. Just before serving, strain into a hot sauceboat, pressing the juices out of the vegetables. Add any juices which may have escaped from the resting roast.
(Or simply discard the veges, add red wine to the pan and boil that with the scraped up juices and scraps and a dash of  soy sauce, taste, then strain.)

Be sure to serve the lamb on hot plates to stop the fat congealing.

I found this entertaining gem online: Julia Child visits 16 master chefs in their own kitchens.

Back from Rarotonga

Ah, Rarotonga. The part of the island we were staying in was like the nicest possible New Zealand seaside retreat, only with wonderful warmth and better sand and water. The local superette, a few minutes’ walk away, had proper cone icecreams and fresh tropical fruit, and the owner of the big house gave us more. I ate masses of it – golden pawpaw, pink guavas, pink passionfruit, pink watermelon, and little green bananas cut from the tree in the garden (forgot to photograph those). With the Palm Grove breakfast the first three days, there were home-made muffins as well...

For the three nights on my own, I had the restaurant barbecue (broadbill steak), 

then cooked a nice little ribeye steak with local veges, and a kind of pasta with tinned salmon (to buy fresh fish, you have to time it right).

After that I was with a family group, and they wanted to eat out, so I happily tagged along. Fresh local tuna, seared as part of a salad nicoise, with thin crunchy local beans. Broadbill in coconut curry. Delicious. Marinated fresh fish (I don’t know what kind) at the Friday night dinner with drums, song and dance, up the mountain. At the wedding itself, a whole roast pig, basted with seawater as it cooked. The last night we had the tuna Bruce and his mates caught, barbecued for us to eat with the usual generous Sunday night salad array at the restaurant over the road. 

       

By the time I got back, I really fancied some meat. So for dinner with neighbours on Friday, I splashed out on a small lamb fillet. 

         The recipe was a summer one I used to make for Harvey, from a great book his mother Betty gave us. The original has spinach leaves, but I used the new crop of lettuce from the garden - oakleaf, red cos and freckles.

Roasted lamb fillet on a young leaf salad with garlic dressing 

(Adapted from Homes and Gardens Cookbook, Brian Glover, 1996)

Lamb

About 300-350g lamb fillet (the Silver Fern pack at the supermarket is 340g)

1/2 tsp whole cummin seeds (though I used ground cummin)

1/2 tsp whole coriander seeds (I had these in the garden!)

black pepper, salt

1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Dry-toast the coriander and cummin in a small pan over a low heat for a few minutes, then grind coarsely (I use my cleaned-out coffee grinder to do this). 

Wash and dry the fillet and roll it in the ground spices. Grind over some black pepper. (You can do this first part a few hours in advance if you want to - the lamb will pick up more flavour.)

Preheat oven to 200C (fan forced if you have it).

Heat olive oil in a large heavy pan till hot, then brown the fillet on all sides.

Place in a small roasting tin, season with salt, and cook for - well, it depends how rare you want it. It should be beautifully rosy inside when it's cut and served. For me this took about 20 minutes.

Turn oven down to 190C and leave on for garlic (see below).

Cover with foil and leave to rest while you do everything else.

Salad

Assortment of young salad leaves

2-3 Tbsp of green herb sprigs (I used sorrel, parsley and chives)

1 plump head of garlic

3 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 tsp French mustard (Dijon is good)

1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar or lemon juice

1-2 Tbsp plain yoghurt

black pepper, salt

Wash and dry the leaves and herbs (a spinner is good). 

As soon as you take out the meat and turn down the oven, trim the hard top off the garlic, sit it in a piece of foil, dribble 1 Tbsp of olive oil over it, wrap it up and put it in the oven to roast (about 30 minutes).

When it's soft, carefully squeeze all the garlic out of its skin into a blender or small bowl, witht he oil.

Mash it to a puree, then beat in the other 2 Tbsp oil, the mustard, and the vinegar or lemon jiuce. Just before you're ready to serve, add the yoghurt. Taste and add salt and pepper as required.

Lay the salad out on a large shallow serving plate and drizzle over the dressing.

Slice the lamb thinly and arrange it down the centre.

We had tiny potatoes with this, but crusty bread or pilaf rice or brown rice are all good too. You can scatter toasted pine nuts over it too (but at $85 a kilo I usually leave them out). Instead I threw in a few strips of yellow pepper to look pretty. This was taken after our first serving, I get too hungry and forget. And it's a bit fuzzy, I'd had rather more pinot than usual. But believe me, it was good.

The taste of home

Harvey grew up on a sheep farm and I’ve always been a townie, but for both of us roast lamb is the taste of childhood Sundays. Their leg of lamb was home-killed, hung for a while and slow-cooked in a wood-fired oven. Ours came from the sawdust-floored butcher round the corner on Friday, sat in the meat safe and went into the tiny gas oven on Sunday morning.
         My mother, like Harvey's, began by putting a chunk of dripping in the roasting pan. The glistening roast came out well-done – pink was unthinkable – but it was always tender and sweet, with that lovely nutty taste of good lamb or (more likely then) hogget. The neat slices curved gently away from Dad’s sharp knife onto the waiting plates, ready for Mum to lay a curl of butter on top.
       Until his health failed, Harvey took great pride and pleasure in being both cook and carver of our lamb roasts.  With some gentle encouragement from me, they became steadily pinker.  When I had to take over, I decided I needed a little French help. Julia Child gave me exactly what I was looking for: a simple, easy variation that’s guaranteed to produce delicious, subtly seasoned roast lamb every time.
           This recipe needs no higher-temperature searing at the beginning, but the total cooking time needs careful working out. MTAFC recommends just 15 minutes per pound for well-done, but even if you want it rare, New Zealand leg of lamb definitely takes longer, and ovens vary. In mine, it takes 30 minutes per 500g for medium rare, plus 20-30 minutes resting time - this is essential. So a 2.5 kg leg needs to go in 3 hours before serving.

Roast leg of lamb in a mustard coat 
(derived from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I)
1 small leg of lamb, about 2.5 kg, trimmed of as much fat as possible (for a bigger one, increase the coating recipe)
A few meaty bones and meat trimmings (I used a cheap shoulder chop to get these)
For the mustard coating:
120 ml Dijon mustard (about 1/2 cup)
2 Tbsp soya sauce (I use Kikkoman)
1-2 cloves mashed garlic
1 tsp finely ground rosemary (you can do this perfectly in the blender - put the leaves in and run it before adding anything else)
1/4 tsp powdered ginger
1 Tbsp good extra virgin olive oil
For the sauce:
Approx. 150 ml white wine (I used a lovely Johner Estate pinot gris this time)

* Take the lamb out of the fridge at least 3 hours before it needs to go in the oven.
* Make the mustard coating - a blender is a big help, but not essential. Grind the leaves finely first, add everything else except the olive oil, and blend by machine or by hand. Beat in the olive oil drop by drop to make a thickish mayonnaise-like cream.
* Use a soft spatula or brush (the spatula seems to work best) to paint the leg of lamb evenly all over. (There should be a little left over - save it for the gravy.)
* Place the meat trimming and bones (with a few extra sprigs of rosemary if you like) in the bottom of a roasting tin. Lay the lamb over them on a rack and set aside until ready to start cooking.

* Preheat the oven to 190C. Turn down to 180C when you put the meat in.
* Roast the lamb until just done to your liking, turning once. (A meat thermometer helps - medium rare is around 155C.)

"...the lamb becomes a beautiful brown as it roasts..." Julia Child

* Rest the leg on a warmed plate, with the bone propped up at an angle so the juices run into the meat, and cover with a folded teatowel until ready to carve.
* Before serving, make the sauce: Briefly brown the meat trimmings and bones in the pan, being careful not to burn them, then remove from pan. Add about 150 ml white wine, scrape bits off the bottom of the pan, and increase heat to reduce the wine by about half. Stir in a tablespoonful (or two) of the leftover mustard coating, plus about 150 ml of water. (I leave the coating in the blender, add water, run it briefly to combine and pour it into the pan.) Deglaze the pan and reduce again until the sauce is a good pouring consistency. Strain into a warmed sauceboat, taste for seasoning, and keep warm, ready for serving.

A roast is made to be shared, and last night we invited dear friends over to eat it with us. I made a very simple, eat-on-our-laps starter of Coromandel smoked peppered mackerel with a few leaves of rocket, parsley and endive from the garden.

The one thing I haven't mastered is carving, so I'd asked Tom to do it. He brought his grandfather's splendid carving set, in its purple-silk-lined box.
        While I steamed a few late green beans, warmed the plates, made the sauce  and checked the potatoes - small halved ones, baked in a separate tin with olive oil, rosemary and sea salt - he set to work.

I love the shape of the old "boat" the sauce goes in - we found it forgotten in a cupboard in the first house we bought together. I'm always a bit nervous about making this, but it turned out very well, not too thick or too salty, adding a slightly stronger note of the mustard and the tang of the wine.

The flavour of the lovely brown mustard coat had gone gently through the meat, and helped to keep it moist. The potatoes were crisp and golden outside and creamy inside. The beans were fine, though more and more I've come to appreciate the French habit of serving the veges as a separate course. Good food and good wine with good friends - what more could we ask?