Spatula, Spoon and Saturday

Book: Food Safari by Maeve O’Meara (recipe by Kumar Mahadevan) Theme: Indian Recipe: Rogan Josh

This week flew, didn’t it? The Cookbook Challenge Week 2 theme is Indian. I have been itching to buy myself an Indian cookbook as I love making Indian food but never really got around to it. The Food Safari book is the companion to the Food Safari series (which I love and have on DVDs despite not having a functional TV at home). It has amazing recipes – which better still can be watched individually on the SBS Food website.

This recipe is such a winner. It’s spicy, and oniony and meaty. The lamb was just so soft and rich. We have a bit of love for this Kashmiri specialty in our house because Josh orders a rogan josh when he is out of ideas at Indian restaurants simply because of its name. We amazingly enough never made it at home. I told Josh the night before about the idea of making rogan josh for the Cookbook Challenge and came home to find that he had defrosted the lamb chops, bought some tomatoes and fennel seeds and already made a start on chopping up the onions so I ended up backseat-cooking and helping him chopping things instead. He did most of the cooking.

We tweaked the recipe a little bit due to availability of ingredients – substituting here and there. But the full recipe, including a video, is available on the SBS Food site. Read the rest of this entry »

Just to prove to you how seriously behind in my blog posting I am, I would like to draw your attention to my Mother’s Day Roast Lamb post. Now you might also recall that Mother’s Day is actually in May here in Australia. Just before, I bought a whole leg of lamb (because the butcher wouldn’t sell me half) so I had the other half chucked into the freezer.

Less than a month later, I roasted the other half and turned it into this very blog post. Yay.

I got this idea from Tessa Kiros’ first book Falling Cloudberries, which is one of my favourite food books of all time. She had the idea to slow roast the lamb with lots and lots of lemon and oregano with potatoes and it sounded delicious so I gave it a go and it was a bit of a hit. Even the Kiwi visitors thought it was all right!

Lemon and Oregano Lamb:

1. Half a leg of leg
2. 1 tbsp of dried oregano
3. 2 lemons
4. 50 g. of butter
5. Salt and pepper to taste
6. Drizzles of olive oil

Preheat the oven to 220′c Stab the leg of lamb with a little knife. Season with plenty of salt and freshly cracked black pepper. Drizzle over some olive oil and massage the lamb with a bit of love. Sprinkle the oregano and squeeze the lemon juice all over the leg. Cut up the butter into little cubes and dot it on the lamb.

Place the lamb on a baking tray and pour a bit of water at the bottom of the making tray (about 1 cm). Bake for about 2.5 hours. Turn the heat down to 180′c after 15 minutes. Keep topping up water if necessary.

Garlic and Yoghurt Sauce

1. 1 cup of Greek style yoghurt
2. 1 small clove of garlic, crushed
3. generous pinch of salt
4. a drizzle of olive oil

Combine the garlic, yoghurt and salt togther. Drizzle with olive oil.

(Josh’s wrap, see how he lines everything up? Aww bless his cotton socks)

Salad

1. Cos lettuce (or any crunch lettuce)
2. Spanish onion
3. Cucumber
4. Flat-leaf parsley (important, don’t skip)
5. Tomato

To serve, warm up some pita bread in the oven (wrap in foil and then place in the oven with the lamb at the end for about 10 minutes). Place some salad and lamb on the pita bread and drizzle with garlic & yoghurt sauce. Dig in.

This is also known as What To Do When You Still Have Leftover Roast Lamb.

If you think the ingredients are a bit questionable, just so you know, this soup is totally in the spirit of desperate food day. I basically start off by tossing the leftover leg of lamb (there wasn’t much left of it), bone and all, into a boiling pot of water and let it stew for about 20 minutes and went from there.

This is literally what happened/my line of thoughts:

• ‘Hmm. Oh! I have corn. That really needs to be used up! They make soup out of corn cobs in Singapore.’ *chop up corn cob into 4 pieces and toss into the pot*
• *consult cookbook for Lamb and Chickpea Soup* ‘Oh they add canned tomatoes and parsley’ *add a can of diced tomatoes and a handful of chopped parsley*
• *find some carrots* ‘Oooh, let’s toss that in’ *chop up and toss in a carrot*
• ‘Maybe something starchy? Oh yeah, I have potatoes!’ *toss in a skin-on, cubed potato*
• ‘Should probably tear the meat of the lamb leg…’ *fish out the lamb leg and shred out the leftover meat, return the meat back to the soup*
• *taste* ‘Hmm, that doesn’t taste very much’ *add a vegetable stock cube*
• *taste* ‘That still doesn’t taste very much’ *add salt and pepper*
• *taste* ‘I think it needs spices. Oh damn. The spice collection is two years old’ *rummage around in the fridge and find instant Japanese curry roux blocks, toss two small blocks into the soup*
• *taste* ‘Hey! Not bad! Need more tomatoey flavour though.’ *add a tbsp of tomato paste, leave to simmer 15 more minutes.

It really wasn’t bad. Seriously.

Note: the ’spicy’ bit in the title is a total lie. The words Japanese curry and spicy do not belong together in a sentence. Ever. But I would totally have added some coriander, cumin and cayenne pepper if I had any.

This is also known as What To Do When You Have Leftover Roast Lamb.

There are four main ingredients in this salad: salad leaves, lamb, grilled veggies and dressing. We already have the lamb of course. This is inspired by a recipe in this month’s Delicious. (what’s with the full stop at the end of its name?) by Tobie Puttock but as usual I went off on my own tangent.

I bought the salad leaves from the market – this is the mixed salad leaves (including three-four different lettuce, radicchio and rocket leaves) and I threw in some fresh flat leaf parsley. Some fresh basil would have been really nice but, well, didn’t have any.

For the grilled veggies, I use zucchini, red capsicum and eggplant. I made up some rosemary oil (olive oil, rosemary, salt and pepper crushed together in a shaker) to brush on them before grilling them.

Brush the veggie slices with the rosemary oil before grilling:

Grill the veggies in a sandwich presser (you can easily just pan fry though) – I also add two garlic cloves to the grill for the dressing later:

Where are we with the salad? Oh, the grilled veggies. Toss them on the salad mix.

And on goes the lamb:

And then the dressing. These are what I used for the dressing:

1. 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2. juice of half a lemon
3. salt & pepper
4. 2 cloves of roasted garlic (made at the same time as the grilled veggies)
5. 1 tsp rosemary leaves (fresh)
6. pinch of sugar

Bung on the dressing and serve with some bread. I have some sundried tomato foccacia – which was kinda average (as average as supermarket foccacia goes) but good enough since I didn’t buy it.

And there you have it – leftover roast lamb salad for two. Josh approves.

I think I may have to make this whole roast thing a weekend staple – although for this particular instance it’s an early Mother’s Day celebration for Lyn – except she likes her meat cremated and I cannot go past medium rare! But she did seem to like the coconut slice I made for her.

So the roast potatoes are basically the same as the roast potatoes in the previous roast chicken post. The carrots, peas and cauliflowers are just steamed in the steamer – add the carrots first and the peas last.

Let’s talk about the lamb. I bought a full leg of lamb from the butcher but that was way too big so I asked him to cut the leg in half and chucked the other half in the freezer (probably more roast next weekend!). The favourite lamb flavouring is of course rosemary and garlic. I’m left with 1 kg of lamb on the bone. Plenty for 5-6 people. We end up with a lot of leftover.

First things first, preheat your oven to 200′C.

Slice an onion and a carrot thickly and line up a baking tray with them. Smash up some garlic cloves (maybe 4-5) and scatter them around as well.

Start with making some incisions in the lamb leg so you can insert some garlic slivers (I use about three cloves) and rosemary. On go the salt & pepper and a bit of olive oil. Give everything a bit of a rub. Then stud the incisions with garlic and rosemary. Turn it over and do the same on the other side.

Into the oven for about 1 3/4 hours at 200 ‘c with the fan on for medium.

If the onion/carrots are starting to burn, add a bit of water to the tray. When you have about 1/2 hour to go, put your potatoes in. See how to roast potatoes.

And the gravy. Again see the last post on gravy.

Leave the lamb to rest for about 10 minutes before carving it up.

Plate it up! Happy Mother’s Day! (Although my family doesn’t celebrate Mother’s Day in May – we do it in August)