Slow-Roasted Lamb with 40 Cloves of Garlic #NationalGarlicDay

Lamb shoulder is the perfect cut for a good long roasting in the oven and it goes especially well with garlic in abundance. The tender meat falls off the bones and the resulting gravy is rich and aromatic. If you’ve never tried lamb shoulder, it’s time, friends, it’s time. This recipe is best started early in the morning, or even the day before you want to serve it.

Growing up, my grandmother had what we call a fouillon about lamb that she passed on to my mother. I have no idea how that’s really spelled but it means a quirk against or an aversion in Cajun French. My mom extended this aversion to anything goat, as well, even my beloved goat milk cheese. She said she could taste the animal and it didn’t taste good. 

Needless to say, we never had lamb at home when I was a child so I didn’t really have an opportunity to try it until I married into a family of Brits who eat lamb all the time. It was too late to change my grandmother's mind, but I am pleased to say that I have converted my mother now and she enjoys rack of lamb and goat cheese. (Still working on the other cuts!) The moral of this story is that your mother is almost always right, unless she’s wrong.

Today we are celebrating National Garlic Day with a great garlicky giveaway and lots of center stage garlic recipes! Aside from its medicinal properties, garlic just tastes good. It adds warmth and spiciness and there are very few recipes that cannot be improved upon by adding garlic. Even ice cream! No kidding. Check out girlichef’s creamy treat made with black garlic in the links below. And make sure to enter the draw for the giveaway. One winner takes all!

Ingredients
Time! (This roasts for 6 and a half hours, not counting preparation and marinating time.)
1 shoulder of lamb on the bone, around 6 lbs or 2.7kg
1 cup or 240ml dry red wine

For seasoning the roast:

Leaves from 2-3 sprigs fresh rosemary (Plus extra sprigs for garnish, if desired)
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
10-12 black or mixed peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 teaspoons flakey sea salt (like Maldon)
12 cloves garlic (about 1 3/4 oz or 50g)
1/8 cup or 30ml pomegranate molasses
1/4 cup or 60ml olive oil
Plus six extra cloves of garlic sliced lengthwise in quarters or sixths.

AND 22 more cloves – more or less – for adding to the pan in the last hour of roasting for a overall total of 40 cloves or about 6 oz or 165g of garlic.

Method
Use a mortar and pestle to crush the first eight ingredients in the spice mix list until you create a fine paste. Add in the pomegranate molasses and olive oil and stir until well combined.

Put the extra six sliced cloves into the mix.

Score the fatty top of your lamb shoulder with a sharp knife. Using a small paring knife, make holes all over the shoulder, turning the knife as you plunge it in to widen the holes enough for you to fit a forefinger in them.

Poke a piece of garlic into each hole, along with some of the spice mixture, until you’ve used up all the extra garlic and have spice filled holes on all the sides of the lamb.

Rub the rest of the spice mixture all over the shoulder. Wrap it securely with cling film, refrigerate and leave to marinate as long as you can. Overnight would be great but even an hour or two would be good.

When you are ready to start roasting the lamb shoulder, remove it from the refrigerator and preheat your oven to 400°F or 200°C.

Put lamb in a baking tray or pan and roast in the preheated oven for 30 minutes.

Add in your cup of wine and another cup of water around the roast. Cover with a tightly fitting lid or some aluminum foil. Turn the oven down to 250°F or 120°C.

After five hours, take the lamb out and toss in the remaining 22 whole garlic cloves. Baste it with the pan juices, cover the pan again and return it to the oven for one last hour of slow roasting.

When you are ready to serve, spoon off the oil in the pan. You can then pull the meat off the bones with a couple of forks and pour the pan juices over it. I let mine cool for quite a while and then wiggled the bones out to leave the roast looking relatively whole. Then I served it with a couple of forks and the pan juices made into gravy on the side. It was divine!

How about these wonderful recipes celebrating GARLIC!

• Black Garlic Chocolate Chunk Ice Cream from All Roads Lead to the Kitchen
• Caesar Tartlets with Sweet Garlic Butter Crusts from Karen's Kitchen Stories
• Garlic and Herb Lamb Chops from Healthy. Delicious.
• Garlic Bread from My Catholic Kitchen
• Garlic Dill Roasted Potato Wedges from From Gate to Plate
• Garlic Fried Rice from Crazy Foodie Stunts
• Garlic Soup with Cheese & Garlic Olive Crunch Bread from The Not So Cheesy Kitchen
• Garlic Trifecta with Quinoa Pasta and Spinach from Peaceful Cooking
• Gnocchetti with Asparagus and Garlic-Gorgonzola Sauce from The Spiffy Cookie
• Heart Healthy Roasted Garlic Chicken Recipe from It's Yummi!
• Roasted Garlic Butter from Basic N Delicious
• Roasted Garlic Chicken Pizza Pockets from Cindy's Recipes and Writings
• Slow-Roasted Lamb with 40 Cloves of Garlic from Food Lust People Love
• Vampire Garlic Dip from Kudos Kitchen By Renee

Roast Leg of Lamb with Garlic and Rosemary

Still on the empty-the-freezer-before-moving program!  It’s Christmas Day in KL and I have prepared all the usual dishes including a roast turkey breast instead of a whole turkey, but we have been invited to a Boxing Day party at my lovely friend Katie’s house, so I am also seasoning and roasting a whole leg of lamb.  We were asked to bring Christmas leftovers so this doesn’t exactly qualify but I hope it will be welcome.

Ingredients

1 whole leg of lamb – ours is 5 lbs or 2.26 kg

4 sprigs of fresh rosemary

5-6 cloves of garlic

Sea salt

Black pepper

Olive oil

Method

Pull the leaves off the rosemary stalks and mince them.

Cut your garlic cloves in half so you have two wide pieces.  Cut these into long strips.

Add the garlic to the rosemary with several good grinds of fresh black pepper and about two teaspoons of flakey sea salt.   Moisten liberally with olive oil and mix.

Score the leg fat with a sharp knife.

Using a sharp, pointed paring knife, make holes in the lamb by inserting and twisting about every two inches or four centimeters. 

Open the holes further by sticking your index finger in them.

Insert a strip of garlic along with some rosemary, salt and pepper mixture in each hole.  Do this all over the leg.  Some holes will be deeper, some shallower.  Such is the nature of a leg of lamb with a bone. 

Rub any leftover seasonings all of the leg.  Add an extra couple of grinds of black pepper. 

If you are not roasting the lamb immediately, refrigerate it, covered until an hour or two before you are ready to cook it.   When you are ready to roast, take it out of the refrigerator and allow to come to room temperature or close.   Preheat your oven to 325°F or 165°C.

Add a cup of water to the pan and roast for about 1 hour 40 minutes to 2 hours 30 minutes, depending on how you like it done.   I find an instant read thermometer handy for this.  (Mine is quite simple, like the one in the link, but there are also thermometers that can be changed between Fahrenheit and Celsius.  (A quick web search in your country will give you a good idea of what is available.) Your internal temperature should be 140°F or 60°C for rare, 160°F or 71°C for medium and 170°F or 70°C for well done.  

Serve with gravy and mint sauce.  Merry Christmas!

Harira or حريرة

Harira or حريرة is a rich soup full of tender lamb, chickpeas, vegetables and noodles, the perfect iftar meal to break a Ramadan fast or a delicious meal anytime of the year.

The western world has the Food Network. Over here, we have the Asian Food Channel. And, as luck would have it, they opened a store and class kitchen in Singapore, just after I moved back to KL. 

The couple of times I've returned to Singapore, there was always an agenda and no shopping or class-taking time.  Imagine my delight when I was invited to go again, all expenses paid – yay, even an executive club room in the hotel, which means open bar and canapés at happy hour! – with my days off and no agenda. 

I immediately got online to sign up for a class.  I really didn’t care what they were teaching; I just wanted to be in the AFC kitchen. The class available on my Saturday there was called Exotic Favorites and we learned to make baklava, a lamb and tomato soup named harira, and the roasted eggplant dip baba ganoush, as part of a traditional mezze.

Now, a confession:  I lost my notes.  All I have left are a bunch of photographs, my memories and this pen.

Pretty cool, huh?

So I am recreating this harira rather slap-dashly and with the help of a few different online recipes.  

I don’t see how it can turn out badly, since all of the ingredients are fresh and tasty but it will not be the same as the one we made at AFC.  For one thing, since we didn’t have two hours for the soup to simmer, the chef had made stock from the lamb and started with that instead of putting it all in together to simmer, as below.  But, hey, all alone here, just me and the hound, I have all the time in the world for simmering.

Ingredients

Olive oil

400g or 14oz lamb

1/2 kilo or 1lb fresh tomatoes

2 medium onions

3 stalks celery – well-washed

1 big bunch cilantro or coriander leaves

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

Good pinch of saffron

Sea salt

Black pepper

Cayenne

60g or about 3 oz tomato paste

1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

30g or about 3 oz fine pasta, broken into short lengths

1 lemon, cut into wedges for squeezing at will (at serving time)

Method

Cube your lamb and brown it in a little olive oil.  Season with black pepper, sea salt and cayenne.

Add two liters or a little more than two quarts of water to the pot.  Bring to the boil.

Meanwhile, chop the celery, tomatoes, onions and the stems of the cilantro and add them to the pot.    Chop up the cilantro leaves and save them for later.

Add in the cinnamon, ginger, saffron and tomato paste.  Simmer, covered, for two hours.  Or more. 

About 10 minutes before serving, add in the chickpeas, dried pasta and chopped cilantro leaves.  Check the seasonings and add more salt and cayenne as needed.  Cook till pasta is al dente.  

According to our AFC chef (I believe his name was Khalil) harira is a traditional iftar soup, originally from Morocco, which means it is commonly eaten during the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan as part of the sunset meal. He said sometimes lentils are added as well, for more substance.

In a side note, I love Google Translate.  When I looked up harira, it gave me that lovely word you see in the title. (Arabic is so beautiful. If only I could read it.) When I turned it around and asked what that word meant, the translation was “calorie.” Now I have one thing I can recognize on a nutrition label, should such a thing exist, when we move to Egypt.

For a vegetarian version, forget the lamb and start from where you add water to the pot.  Add vegetable stock (homemade or from a couple of cubes and water) and go from there.  You might want to add the lentils for extra protein. 

Here are a few photos of the AFC kitchen and store. It seems that since then, the Asian Food Channel was bought out by an American company so the test kitchen is no longer open, more's the pit. 

* I paid for my own class and received no compensation for writing this post.

Roast Lamb for Two and Yorkshire Pudding

Who says you have to have a big family to enjoy a roast leg of lamb dinner? Buy some meaty lamb shanks and join me in the kitchen for roast lamb for two and Yorkshire pudding.

Just doing a little shopping in my local grocery store, Hock Choon, yesterday and I came across the biggest lamb shank ever, almost one kilo it was.  And I suddenly remembered an old Nigella episode where she was eating alone and roasted a lamb shank for one.  Ha, I thought, this little baby will do for two of us.  Who says you have to have a big family to enjoy a roast leg of lamb dinner? 

So, on the menu tonight:  succulent roast leg (albeit the lower part) of lamb, Yorkshire pudding, buttered sweet peas and lots of gravy.

For the lamb

Ingredients

1 large meaty lamb shank (800+grams) or, I suppose, 2 small shanks -please adjust roasting time downward accordingly

2 sprigs rosemary

Sea salt

Black pepper

1/2 cup red wine

Olive oil

Ziploc bag for marinating

Method

Pull the leaves off of half of each rosemary stalk and chop finely.  Add a generous amount of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Score the fat on the lamb. By which I mean, cut through the fat in even lines with a very sharp knife.

Rub the salt, pepper and rosemary into the meat.  

Pop it in the bag and add a good drizzle of olive oil and the red wine.  Marinate for as long as you can.  Overnight is best but a few hours will also do.

When you are ready to roast it, preheat your oven to 400°F or 200°C and take the lamb out of the refrigerator to warm.  

Put the lamb in a baking pan and drizzle a little olive oil all over.  Roast for 30 minutes.  (At this point, make your Yorkshire pudding batter. It needs to rest before cooking so the lamb roasting time is perfect.  See below.) 

After 30 minutes, turn the lamb over and pop it back in the hot oven.

Roast for another 30 minutes or until the internal temperature reaches 140°F or 60°C for rare or 150°F or 65°C for medium rare.

Wrap the lamb loosely in foil while you make the gravy and bake the Yorkshire pudding

For the Yorkshire pudding

Ingredients

110g or 4 oz (by weight) or 8/10 cup flour

1 egg

1/4 teaspoon salt

8 oz milk

2 oz water

1 1/2 tablespoons of fat – oil, duck fat, bacon drippings or some combination of same

Method

Measure all of your ingredients into a blender or vessel for a hand blender.  I always put the egg at the bottom, and then the milk and water and then the flour.  This stops the flour from forming a thick paste at the bottom that sticks to the sides.   

This should be the consistency of thick cream.

 Mix thoroughly.

Leave the batter to rest until the lamb is out of the oven.

Add your fat of choice to the Yorkshire pudding pan and pop it in the hot oven.  I used duck fat rendered from recent pan-frying of duck breasts.  (If you have the opportunity to render and save duck fat or bacon grease for that matter, make sure to strain it through a single layer of paper towel and refrigerate. Most paper towels are two thin sheets. Separate them carefully and use only one as a filter.)

Once the fat is smoking, open the oven door, pull the shelf out and pour the batter into the pan.  (If you want to take photos, this requires two people.  Fortunately my sweetie was home to take over photography duties.)

I told him, No flash! The dark is not his fault. 

Here the duck fat is surrounding the batter. Fear not. I poured some off when I extracted the crispy batter.  It doesn't all soak in. 

Close the door quickly and bake for 20 minutes until brown and crispy.

When you are ready to serve, slice the lamb and cut the Yorkshire pudding into sections.  Add a nice serving of hot buttered peas and a liberally helping of gravy.

That would be our gravy yacht at 2 o'clock. You only have a gravy boat? I'm sorry. 

Enjoy.