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Archive for the ‘Lamb’ Category

Neeps n Shanks

Posted in Food, Lamb, tagged , , , , on 1 March 2012| 5 Comments »

Real comfort food with rich and deep flavours. We took the meat of the shanks when they were cooked cause our bowls weren’t big enough!

A dish of lamb shanks with preserved lemon and swede – to serve 4

  • 2 large onions, sliced into thick segments
  • 3 tbsp olive oil
  • 4 lamb shanks
  • 2 tbsp plain flour
  • 3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
  • 750ml light stock or water
  • 200ml white vermouth or white wine
  • a large turnip (or a swede if that’s what you call them), cut into chunks
  • juice of half a lemon
  • 2 preserved lemons
  • 4 bushy sprigs of parsley

Preheat the oven to 160°C/Gas 3.

Warm the oil in a deep casserole and season the lamb. Lighlty brown the lamb all over in the oil, then lift it out.

Add the onions to the pan. Let them soften and colour a little , then stir in the flour.

Add the garlic, stock and wine and bring to the boil. As soon as it boils, add the turnip and the lemon juice along with the spent lemon shell, plus some seasoning.

Put the lamb shanks back in, cover with greaseproof paper and a lid and put in the oven for 2 hours, turning the shanks now and then.

After an 1½ hours cut the preserved lemons in half and scrape out the pith. Chop the skin fairly finely. Add to the casserole and continue to cook for the remaining 30 minutes or until the turnip is tender and you can easily pull the lamb from the bones.

Roughly chop the parsley leaves and add to the casserole. Let it settle for a minute or two before serving.

Wine Suggestion: We would usually pair lamb with red wine but it’s important to think about the sauce when you are matching wine with food. This dish has quite an intense lemon flavour and the sauce is rich which calls more for a full-bodied white such as an oaked Sémillon.

(Original recipe from Nigel Slater’s Tender Volume 1, Fourth Estate, 2009.)

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Leg of Lamb à la Périgourdine – Cosciotto alla Perigordina

Posted in Food, Italian, Lamb on 9 October 2011| 2 Comments »

This is the easiest Sunday roast you’ll ever make. It takes minutes to prepare and then all you have to do is wait 5 hours while it becomes meltingly tender in the oven. No carving required as you can easily pull the meat apart with a spoon. Delicious!

Leg of Lamb à la Périgourdine – to serve 6

  • 3 tbsp olive oil
  • 20g butter
  • 2kg leg of lamb, skinned
  • 2 tbsp brandy
  • 6 garlic cloves
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 1 leek, trimmed and chopped
  • 1 fresh thyme sprig, chopped
  • 1 celery stick, chopped
  • 1 clove
  • 1 bottle dry white wine
Preheat the oven to 150°C/300°F/Gas Mark 2.

Heat the oil and butter in a roasting tin, add the lamb and turn until browned all over.

Add the brandy, heat for a few seconds, then ignite and cover with a big saucepan lid or baking tray to extinguish the flames.

Put the garlic around the lamb, add the onion, leek, thyme, parsley, celery and clove, season with salt and pepper and pour in the wine.

Cover tightly and roast for 5 hours. Carefully transfer to a warm serving dish, throw away the garlic and serve with the gravy.

Serve with some nice greens.

Wine Suggestion: Stick to something Italian with a bit of acidity and tannin – either a Sangiovese or a Cabernet Sauvignon would work well. We drank a Rosso Di Montalcino which was lovely.

(Original recipe from Silver Spoon, Phaidon 2005).

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Lamb & Apricot Tagine

Posted in Food, Lamb, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on 18 August 2011| 3 Comments »

Jono liked this so much he swears that if he’d been on his own he would have scoffed the lot! The combination of lamb shoulder, spices, apricots and preserved lemons give this dish such richly and multi-layered flavours that are all exceptionally well balanced and moreish. Make the most of fresh apricots while we can get them!

This needs time to marinate which will add even more depth of flavour and tastiness, but if you forget even a short marinating time will still give a very nice result.

Lamb Tagine with Apricots (serves 4)

  • 1kg lamb shoulder, diced
  • 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
  • 2 teaspoons ground turmeric
  • 1 tablespoon sweet paprika
  • 1 teaspoon hot paprika
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 3 onions, roughly chopped
  • 4 garlic cloves, finely sliced
  • 60g sultanas
  • 2 tablespoons runny honey
  • 1 teaspoon saffron
  • 750 ml vegetable stock
  • 2 x 400g tins chopped tomatoes
  • 350g fresh apricots
  • 1 preserved lemon, pulp discarded and skin finely chopped
  • 1 handful coriander leaves, torn
  • 1 small handful mint leaves, torn

Mix ground spices thoroughly together then toss lamb in half the ground spices and leave for at least 4 hours, but try to marinate from the night before (we didn’t read the recipe properly so didn’t marinade it at all and it was still fab!).

Heat oven to 160C/Gas 3. Warm olive oil gently in a deep, heavy-based casserole and add seasoned meat in small batches; brown on all sides and then remove. Next add the onions and garlic with the remaining spices and soften, stirring regularly. Add a little more oil if it dries too much because of the spices. Be careful to moderate the heat as you don’t want to burn the spices.

Add sultanas, honey, saffron, stock, tomatoes and whole apricots and then return the meat to the pan. Bring to the boil, season with salt and black pepper, cover with a lid and place into the oven.

Cook for 2.5 hours.

Remove tagine and stir in the preserved lemon. Lift meat out with a slotted spoon and boil sauce over a high heat until reduced and thick.

Return meat to sauce and stir in the coriander and mint.

Serve with couscous.

[Original recipe from Nigel Slater: Tender Volume II (fruits)]

Wine suggestion: a lighter Pinot Noir from New Zealand’s 2009 vintage. This vintage is excellent all the way across NZ so that even the €6.00 Tesco Finest: Marlborough Pinot Noir 2009 was a delight; and a complete bargain! (Thanks Michael!)

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We ♥ Curry

Posted in Asian, Food, Indian, Lamb, Uncategorized on 8 August 2011| 3 Comments »

The best curry we’ve ever made by a mile! This was fabulous – so much lighter than takeaway and the lamb just melted. Our whole chillies kind of disintegrated into the sauce so prepare yourself for a good chilli kick. You can grind the whole spices in a mortar and pestle but we’ve invested in a little electric spice grinder which turns them into fine powder almost instantly. A microplane is the way forward for grating ginger and garlic. Two of our more successful kitchen gadgets!

Spicy lamb, tomato and coconut curry – to serve 4

  • 1tbsp coriander seeds
  • 1 tsp cumin seeds
  • 15 black peppercorns
  • 5cm cinnamon stick
  • 4 cloves
  • 500g boneless lamb shoulder, cubed
  • 3 small onions, finely chopped
  • 3 tomatoes, chopped
  • 15g ginger, peeled weight, grated to a paste
  • 8 fat garlic cloves, grated to a paste
  • 3-6 green chillies, whole but pierced
  • salt
  • 2 tbsp ghee, or you can use half butter and half vegetable oil
  • 200-300ml coconut milk, or to taste
  • 1 1/2 tsp lemon juice, or to taste
Use your spice grinder or mortar and pestle to pound the spices to a fine powder.

Put the lamb, 2 of the chopped onions, tomatoes, ginger, garlic, chillies, spices and salt in a large saucepan. Add 500ml water, bring to a boil, then cover and cook gently for 45-60 minutes, or until the lamb is cooked and soft. Give it a stir every 10 minutes or so.

After about 45 minutes, melt the ghee in a small saucepan and fry the remaining onion until well browned.

Once the lamb is cooked you need to cook off all the excess moisture over a high heat, stirring often, until almost all the sauce has been absorbed by the lamb. This is called bhunoing and helps deepen the flavours (try it before and after to see the difference it makes). Add the browned onion and ghee.

Pour in the coconut milk and lemon juice, bring to a boil and simmer for 5 minutes; the sauce should be thick and creamy. Taste and adjust the seasoning, and add lemon or coconut milk until it tastes amazing.

We served this with brown basmati rice.

(Original recipe from Anjum Anand’s I ♥ Curry, published by Quadrille)

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Shoulder of Lamb à La Boulangère (Spalla Alla Fornaia)

Posted in Food, Lamb, tagged , , , , , on 12 June 2011| Leave a Comment »

It’s another wintery dish made a bit more seasonal by the minty summer vegetables on the side. Yes it’s another very wet and chilly day in Ireland. Rather than get down about it we have turned it into an opportunity and spent all day indoors cooking. We got this recipe from Silver Spoon (the Italian cooking bible)  hence the Italian translation above. Perfect for feeding a crowd as easy to prep in advance and the only last minute work is to steam the veg and carve the meat.

Shoulder of Lamb à la Boulangère – to serve 6

  • 25g butter, plus a bit extra for greasing
  • 1 kg potatoes, thinly sliced
  • 1 tbsp chopped thyme
  • 500g onions, thinly sliced
  • 2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
  • 1 kg boneless shoulder of lamb
  • 500ml meat or veg stock
  1. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6. Grease a large ovenproof dish with butter. Make a layer of potatoes on the base of the dish, season with salt and pepper, sprinkle with a little thyme and cover with a layer of onions and garlic.  Continue making layers until all these ingredients have been used.
  2. Make a few incisions in the lamb with a little knife, put it on top of the vegetables and season. Pour the stock into the dish, dot the lamb with butter and roast, basting the potatoes now and then, for 30 minutes.
  3. Remove the dish from the oven and cover with a sheet of foil, then put it back in the oven for 40-45 minutes. Leave the meat to stand with the cover on for 10 minutes before serving.
  4. Serve with some steamed greens (we used fresh peas and asparagus) with some mint and a drizzle of olive oil.
Wine suggestion: Lamb has traditional matches like Rioja and Bordeaux, so we chose a bottle of Sarget de Gruaud -Larose from St. Julien in Bordeaux and from the classic 2004 vintage. It worked a treat with delightful blackcurrant aromas and flavours overlaid with sophisticated cedar and other sweet spices. As it is more medium bodied, despite powerful flavours it didn’t overwhelm the food and complimented it superbly.

 

 

 

 

 

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Kerala Lamb Stew

Posted in Food, Indian, Lamb, tagged , , , , , , on 8 February 2011| 5 Comments »

This is the first recipe we’ve tried from Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Easy.

Be warned… it’s little bit unusual. In our picture it looks kind of like an Irish stew weirdly paired with rice. In fact it is very like an Irish stew except it has Indian spices and coconut milk in it (so not actually very Irish at all).

Still if you’re prepared to try something a bit different, this is actually really nice with a sauce which is not overtly spicy . More mild and warming and perfect comfort food for a cold night. I suspect this is much more authentic than the rich sauces we have come to associate with Indian food.

Kerala Lamb Stew – serves 4

  • 4 tbsp olive or rapeseed oil
  • 2 cinnamon sticks
  • 0.5 tsp whole black peppercorns
  • 10 cloves
  • 10 cardamom pods
  • 1 large red onion, finely chopped
  • about 20 curry leaves, torn (you can buy these in asian shops and this recipe suggests 10 fresh basil leaves as a substitute if you can’t get them. Don’t be fooled by the dry ones you can buy in supermarkets though as they are not a good substitute.)
  • 2 tsps very finely grated ginger
  • 900g stewing lamb
  • 450g potatoes, pelled and diced into 2.5cm cubes
  • 4 medium carrots, cut into 4cm chunks
  • 1.75 tsps salt
  • 0.25 to 1.5 tsps cayenne pepper
  • 300ml coconut milk (shake the tin well before opening)

Heat the oil in a large, heavy pan over a medium-high heat.

Add the cinnamon sticks, peppercorns, cloves and cardamom and sizzle for a few seconds.

Add the onion and stir until it turns light brown.

Add the curry leaves and ginger and stir for a minute.

Add the lamb and stir it around for a few minutes.

Add 1 litre of water and bring to the boil. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes.

Add the potatoes, carrots, salt and cayenne pepper and bring to the boil.

Cover and cook gently for 40 minutes, or until the meat is tender.

Add the coconut milk and crush a few of the potato pieces against the side of the pan to thicken the sauce.

Bring to a simmer and serve.

 

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