Okay, this is pants. I had all these plans made for the wretched weather weekend we were forecast. Things like, baking, movie watching, soup eating, movie watching, popcorn etc. Okay, so we were going to eat and watch TV but you get my drift.
Today I had to take 3 kids and a dog for a big run around. They were going stir crazy. D. had offered to take them but I needed fresh air. The alternative to fresh air was staying in and re-cleaning the house. Have you any idea how crazy it is to try and walk a dog and keep an eye on 3 kids on their bikes. By a lake?????? It's er, put it this way, you don't want to get distracted by the pretty leaves on the trees. Or distracted talking to your cousin on the phone. That's how the dog fell in. He was barking and barking and I had to keep asking M to repeat himself so I threw the dog a ball and . . . he went into the lake. The car smells like wet dog. So do I. Mike Wazowski might like the smell of wet dog but I don't.
Still, came home to lovely clean house and the smell of lamb cooking. To #3 it's beef (for some reason it's less horrible to kill and eat a cow) but it's lamb we're having. Here's the recipe. I used half a leg (doing a loaves and fishes thing here today as asked sister and bro-in-law over) so watch the time.
You'll need:
1 leg of lamb, about 2.5kg
Olive Oil
3-4 sprigs of rosemary (when I came in D said he didn't like the look of the rosemary in the garden so didn't use it. Just as well he didn't, he would have been using oregano)
Sea Salt
For the red wine gravy
1 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, bashed
1 carrot, peeled and roughly chopped
300ml red wine
500ml lamb stock (if you can find it, I used vegetable)
1 tbsp redcurrant jelly (forgot to buy it so . . . went without)
Then you:
Heat the oven to 190c/fan170c/gas 5. Put the lamb into a shallow roasting tray and rub olive oil all over the surface. Make holes in the lamb with a small sharp knife and stick a few sprigs of rosemary in each. Sprinkle with sea salt.
Roast for 1.5 hours. Leave to rest, loosely covered with foil for at least 30 minutes while you make the gravy.
To make the gravy, fry all the vegetables in 1tbsp olive oil until well browned. Add the juices from the lamb, the red wine and stock. Simmer until reduced by half. Stir in the redcurrant jelly until dissolved. Strain the liquid into a warm jug and serve piping hot.
It's meant to look like the picture below (mine more or less did only without showing as much leg) and the recipe originates from the BBC Good Food magazine. I think. A recipe I tore out many, many years ago.
