Easy Lamb Shoulder Roast

Tender and flavorful, this easy lamb shoulder roast melts in your mouth! It’s simple to prepare and, after a fast start, cooks long and slow in the oven. Time making this dish is mostly hands-off. 

If you’ve been reading here a while, you know how much I adore Jamie Oliver. Since his young, baby-face days as the Naked Chef, I’ve watched his career expand as he grew up. Now with a family of his own, he has one of his son’s looking to follow in his footsteps, as he did with his own dad who ran the family pub kitchen.

While occasionally he does a fancy cheffy thing, a nod to his culinary training, most of his recipes are deliciously down-to-earth, like this one. 

Easy Lamb Shoulder Roast

If you can’t find new potatoes or young carrots, substitute regular ones, peeled and cut into chunks. This recipe is adapted from one of Jamie Oliver’s in his book, Jamie at Home: Cook Your Way to the Good Life, published in 2006. I’ve been making some version of it ever since.

Ingredients

1 (2.2 lb or 1 kg) half shoulder of lamb

Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

3-4 sprigs fresh rosemary

1 head garlic, peeled and large cloves halved

1 yellow onion, peeled and cut in thick slices

Olive oil

1 lb or 450g new potatoes

12 oz or 340g young carrots

Method

Preheat your oven as high as it goes, 450-500°F or 232-260°C.

Score the fat side of the lamb with a sharp knife. 

Rub it all over with a generous amount of fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. 

Wrap it in cling film and set aside while you prep the garlic and onion according to the ingredient list.

Drizzle a little olive oil in the bottom of your Dutch oven and arrange the onion slices to cover the area where the lamb will rest. Put half of the garlic on top, along with half of the leaves from your rosemary, stripped from the sprigs. 

Unwrap the lamb and lay it fat side up on the onion, garlic and rosemary. Drizzle the top of the lamb with more olive oil. Add on the balance of the garlic and stripped rosemary leaves with another little drizzle of oil.

Put the cover on the Dutch oven (or a tightly fitting piece of thick foil) and put it in the oven. Immediately turn the oven temperature down to 325°F or 163°C. 

Roast for three hours. Meanwhile, scrub the new potatoes and young carrots and toss them with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. Set them aside, ready to go in. 

When the three hours are up, remove the Dutch oven from the oven and take the lid off carefully, so you don’t burn yourself.

Add in the potatoes and carrots and turn them in the pan juices. Put the lid back on and roast for a further 30 minutes. 

Remove from the oven and check to see if the meat is falling off the bones yet. It should be! 

If you’d like a little more color on your lamb, baste it with the pan juices and pop it back in the oven without the lid for another 15-20 minutes or until it is colored to your satisfaction. 

Remove the lamb to a serving platter with the potatoes and carrots. 

Pan juices, along with the onion, garlic and rosemary, can be made into gravy with the addition of a little flour and stock or they can be served as is on the side. 

Enjoy!

Welcome to the 12th edition of Alphabet Challenge 2026, brought to you by the letter L. Many thanks to Wendy from A Day in the Life on the Farm for organizing and creating the challenge. Check out all the L recipes below:

• Deviled Eggs with Lemon Caper Remoulade from Faith, Hope, Love, & Luck Survive Despite a Whiskered Accomplice
• Easy Lamb Shoulder Roast from Food Lust People Love
• Greek Pork Chops from A Day in the Life on the Farm
• Instant Pot Spicy Moroccan Lamb and Lentil Stew from A Messy Kitchen
• Lasooni Palak from Mayuri’s Jikoni
• Lemon Lavender Scones from Blogghetti
• Lemon Lush from Jolene’s Recipe Journal
• Lentil Pasta from Mildly Indian
• Lentil, Sweet Pepper, Spinach, and Linguica from Karen’s Kitchen Stories
• Low Carb 2 Ingredient Oats Bread from Sneha’s Recipe

Here are my posts for the 2026 alphabet challenge, thus far:

A: Ají de Cerdo aka Peruvian Pork Stew

B: Baby Cos Peach Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing 

C. Traditional Cullen Skink 

D. Coconut Cream Date Caramel 

E. Edamame Summer Salad 

F. Lamb Feta Mint Patties 

G. Ricotta Gnocchi à la Poêle 

H. Hazelnut Vodka 

I. Italian Sausage Stuffed Mini Peppers - this post!

J. Jägersuppe - Hunter's Soup 

K. Easy Chicken Kapama 

L. Easy Lamb Shoulder Roast - this post!

To check out the Alphabet Challenges for 2024 and 2025, click here.

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Brown Sugar Lemon Cassava Loaf #BreadBakers

Naturally gluten free, this Brown Sugar Lemon Cassava Loaf bakes up light and fluffy with a lovely crunchy sugar top. It’s great as is or even toasted.

A couple of my fellow food bloggers have introduced me through their recipes to two flours I had never used before, cassava and coconut. No one in my family needs to be gluten free but I do love experimenting with new ingredients. 

Recently I read the fascinating book, Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America and learned even more about the traditional use of cassava in cooking and baking by the indigenous tribes of the Caribbean. 

To quote the Amazon blurb: “Exemplifying how Native foodways can teach us all to connect with the natural world around us, Turtle Island features rich narrative histories and spotlights the communities producing, gathering, and cooking these foods, including remarkable stories of ingenuity and adaptation that capture the resilience of Indigenous communities.” 

It's an amazing read and extremely humbling. There’s so much I didn’t know and still need to learn about this continent, pre-arrival of foreign colonizers.

I was expecting guests for a teatime visit a couple of weeks ago so I decided to give cassava flour a spin. They took the leftovers home with them, one saying that she planned to eat her slices with coffee for breakfast, that’s how well it went over! 

Brown Sugar Lemon Cassava Loaf

Both my husband and I thought the loaf could have been a little sweeter but, as I said, the guests liked it just as it was. If you have a bit of a sweet tooth, use the whole ¾ cup or 150g of brown sugar in the list. Next time I bake this, I plan to. 

Ingredients

1 ½ cups or 180g cassava flour

½ – ¾ cup or 100-150g dark brown sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon fine sea salt

Zest 1 lemon (save lemon for juicing)

3 eggs, room temperature

½ cup or 120ml canola or other light oil

½ cup or 123g plain full-fat Greek yogurt

Juice 1 lemon (about 3 tablespoons)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

Optional but highly recommended for that crunchy top: 2-3 tablespoons turbinado sugar

Method

Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and line a loaf pan with baking parchment.

In a large bowl, whisk together the cassava flour, brown sugar, baking powder, sea salt and lemon zest.

In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs, oil, yogurt, lemon juice and vanilla extract together until smooth.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry mixture and fold until it is just combined but make sure no flour is showing.

Pour the batter into your lined loaf pan. I hold the baking parchment up with clothes pegs which works a treat. You do have to remove them before baking! 

Sprinkle on the turbinado sugar, if using. 

Bake for 45–50 minutes. The edges should be golden brown, and a toothpick inserted in the center should come out clean.

Leave to cool in the pan then remove to a wire rack to cool completely. 

Slice to serve. Enjoy! 

It’s the second Tuesday of the month which means it’s time for my Bread Baker friends to share their bakes. Our theme today is Breakfast Bread! Many thanks to our host Kelly from A Messy Kitchen. Check out the links below.

• Brown Sugar Lemon Cassava Loaf from Food Lust People Love 
• Girelle - Italian Breakfast Pastry from Karen's Kitchen Stories
• Greek Yogurt and Blueberry Oat Muffins from A Day in the Life on the Farm
• Kheema Anda Paratha from Sneha's Recipe
• Sourdough Gingerbread Waffles from A Messy Kitchen
• Sourdough Plum Almond Bread from Zesty South Indian Kitchen
• Zucchini Cassava Muffins from Passion Kneaded

#BreadBakers is a group of bread loving bakers who get together once a month to bake bread with a common ingredient or theme. Follow our Pinterest board right here. Links are also updated each month on this home page. We take turns hosting each month and choosing the theme/ingredient.

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Spicy Barbecue Sauce

A perfect blend of sweet and savory, this flavorful spicy barbecue sauce is great slathered on chicken and pork ribs or even grilled vegetables. Serve extra on the side for those of us (me!) who also like to dip. 

Living overseas in tiny oilfield towns early in my married life, I discovered that some items most Americans would consider normal essentials, like barbecue sauce and Jif peanut butter, simply were not available. I learned to adapt by either doing without, making my own or trying to bring some back in our suitcases after a trip stateside.

When we wanted barbecue sauce, this recipe is the one I made most often, sometimes adding some smoked bacon, which adds an additional smoky touch, for when I didn’t have liquid smoke, or sometimes even when I did! Because bacon makes everything better.

Brush this sauce on the meat or vegetables on the grill when they are just about cooked so that it doesn't scorch. If you brush it on too early, you risk it burning because of the sugar in the sauce both from the brown sugar and what is already in the prepared ketchup. 

Spicy Barbecue Sauce

If you need this spicy barbecue sauce to be vegetarian, do use the Henderson’s Relish instead of Worcestershire sauce, which has anchovies in it. Failing that, you can add soy sauce instead. For the ketchup, use your favorite brand or even a store brand. It won’t much matter once the other things are added. This recipe makes almost 2 ½ cups or 570ml.

Ingredients

1 medium onion

1 tablespoon olive oil

14 oz or 397ml ketchup 

3/4 cup or 180ml cider vinegar

1/4 cup aged balsamic vinegar

2/3 cup or 132g dark brown sugar

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce or Henderson’s Relish

1 tablespoon smoked paprika

2 teaspoons ground cumin

2 teaspoons freshly cracked black pepper

1 teaspoon cayenne

1 1/2 teaspoons fine sea salt

1 teaspoon liquid smoke

Method

Mince the onion finely or use a small food processor to get little bits. You don't want it pureed, just not chunky. 

In a pot large enough to hold all of your ingredients, sauté the onion with the olive oil over a medium heat until it has softened completely and no longer smells strongly of onion. You are looking for a little color, some caramelization, all the better for creating flavor.

Add all the other ingredients to the onion pot.

Bring it to a simmer over medium heat and cook for about 10 minutes.

Cool and store in a sterilized jar in the refrigerator until ready to use. Because of the vinegar content, I find that this is good for quite a while once refrigerated. 

Enjoy!

It’s Sunday FunDay and today we are sharing recipes for your cookout get-togethers! Snacks, side dishes, sauces, dressings, salads or desserts - all good. Many thanks to our host Wendy of A Day in the Life on the Farm. Check out the links below. 

• Caribbean Pineapple & Honey Mustard Pork Chops from Faith, Hope, Love, & Luck Survive Despite a Whiskered Accomplice
• Eggless & Gluten Free Orange Pots from Sneha's Recipe
• Green Goddess Dressing from A Day in the Life on the Farm
• Spicy Barbecue Sauce from Food Lust People Love
• Sweet and Savory Party Mix from A Messy Kitchen
• Viral Japanese Cheesecake from Mayuri's Jikoni
• Watermelon Radish and Cucumber Salad from Karen's Kitchen Stories

 

We are a group of food bloggers who believe that Sunday should be a family fun day, so every Sunday we share recipes that will help you to enjoy your day. If you're a blogger interested in joining us, just visit our Facebook group and request to join.

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