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March 28, 2005
Leg of lamb
While on the subject of things to eat, let me tell you how we did the leg of lamb for Easter.
If you cook leg of lamb in the French style, rare to medium rare, you may find it stays too rare next to the bone. Nathalie had a 2 kg leg that I therefore deboned using a utility knife Mom gave us as a present. Proceed carefully, and keep the knife very sharp. Leave the lamb out so it's at room temperature when you cook it. The meat cooks more uniformly, medium around the outsides, medium rare at the core.
To get the meat ready for the oven, rub herbs all over the leg. Don't salt the meat until after cutting it. Do apply liberal quantities of coarsely ground pepper, herbes de provence, and garlic powder -- not garlic cloves, and place the leg in an oiled dish that'll go in the oven. You can oil the leg a bit, too, to get the herbs to stick. Form a roast of the leg in the dish, fat side up. You may want to pull the end of the calf through the place where the bone was. If you don't have to wash your hands with plenty of soap before continuing, you probably didn't apply enough herbs and oil.
Next, preheat the oven as hot as it will normally go. While it warms up, peel enough cloves of garlic to cover up the corners of the dish not covered by lamb leg. Put the dish in the middle of the very hot oven, close the door, and turn the heat down to hot. The idea -- rough equivalent to browning -- is that high heat crisps up the outside of the meat, but you don't want to leave it so high that it burns or gets dry.
Leg of lamb needs to cook about 15 minutes to the pound in this style, so our roast yesterday cooked for an hour. After the cooking's done, turn the oven off. Lamb needs to sit for a few minutes before you slice it.
Put the lamb on the cutting board and prepare the sauce with all the garlic cloves by adding something vinegary and salt to taste. You can also use plain water if you're going to serve mint sauce. I used liquid from pickled cherries.
If you want to stay in the French style, also serve flageolets (essentially green bean seeds) heated in a pan with olive oil, garlic, pepper, and salt, potentially some tomato paste, finished with a tablespoon of vinegar, and with duchesse potatoes. You'll also want red wine with plenty of flavor and character. Get all your vegetables ready, the wine opened, sauce in a dish, everyone at the table. Then slice the lamb thin across the grain, arrange the slices on a platter, and sprinkle with fleur de sel. Get it to the table before it cools.
Posted by Mark at March 28, 2005 08:10 AM