Very slow roasted shoulder of lamb with merguez spices

A shoulder of lamb is a hefty cut, but it's cheap and it goes a long way.

This method leaves the lamb falling apart, tender from the best part of a day in the oven.

It's very satisfying and relaxing to know that something great is happening in your oven at home whilst you're out doing mundane things.  My mind often wanders towards the slow cooker or low oven at home when I'm trapped in dull meetings at work, talking round and round in circles yet again.  They can keep their little empires and office politics - I'll have my roast lamb instead.

Toast a teaspoon each of cumin, coriander and fennel seeds together in a dry frying pan with a teaspoon of black peppercorns and half a stick of cinnamon until they start to take on some colour and smell exotic.  Grind the spices to a rough powder in a pestle and mortar or old coffee grinder.

Add a good pinch of cayenne pepper, two teaspoons of smoked paprika, two teaspoons of salt, two finely chopped cloves of garlic and the finely chopped leaves from couple of large sprigs of rosemary.  Mix together well.

Add enough olive oil to the spices to create a sticky but loose paste.

The spices add a pungent North African feel to the meat.  These are the same spices used in the Muergez sausage, popular in Libya, Tunisia and Algeria, although I'd hazard a guess that the proportion of cayenne is a lot larger in North Africa than here.

Next, prepare the lamb.  With a sharp knife, score the skin of the lamb in a diamond pattern, cutting no more than a couple of millimetres into the flesh.  Rub half of the spice paste into the meat, massaging it in well.

Roast the joint for half an hour at 220C, then use a spoon to spread the rest of the spice mix over the top of the meat.  Add a glass of water to the roasting tray to get the juices going, and cover the tray with foil.

The initial hot half hour just gets the cooking going and gives the meat some colour.  It's an essential part of the HFW theory of meat roasting.

Turn the heat right down to 120C and leave to cook for at least six whole hours.

After this time, the meat should be falling off the bone, so just tear it into chunks.  Lamb shoulder is a joint that can't really be carved with any elegance, so just hack away.

The lamb will be tender and delicious, warm and quite irresistible.

The pan juices are spicey and hot, and should be served poured over the meat.  Eat with something green - cabbage, broccoli, that sort of thing, and some roasted squash or potatoes.  This lamb is also superb stuffed into a pita bread with some salad.

This recipe is from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Everyday.

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Bill Granger's Feed Me Now

I've never really liked 'performance' cookery.  Most of the cooking I do is on the hoof, unplanned, un-shopped-for and generally last minute and chaotic.  Quite often, it's done without really enough time.

It's in this type of cooking that the real skill lies.

What marks out a great cook is not the ability to produce one stellar dish every once in a while, but the ability to turn out tasty, healthy and inviting food on a weekday night after a frustrating and hard day at work.

That's the real challenge.

Bill Granger clearly understands this.  His book is squarely aimed at tackling this type of problem.

Granger is the star of the Australian cooking world, having opened his first restaurant, bills, in Sydney at the tender age of twenty-two, following that with another brace of Sydney restaurants before expanding overseas to Japan in 2008.  His food is relaxed and informal, rooted in Granger's self-taught background.

Feed Me Now is a collection of recipes with the time-poor in mind.  Granger emphasises the simplicity of his food, the speed with which it can be cooked and emphasises a central belief that food should be shared with family.  Food and family are life.

This is a substantial collection, with plenty of ideas and some great photography.  It's a lifestyle book with substance.

Recipes revolve around the main meals of the day.  The chapter on breakfast includes a sublime recipe for oaty hotcakes, pancakes with the added punch of a big handful of oats and some cinnamon and nutmeg that were an instant success this Sunday morning, the kids hoovering them up faster than I could flip them out of the pan.

A recipe for cinnamon crunch muesli seemed a little too obvious - why bother making your own muesli?

Other dishes reflect Sydney's culinary influence.  There is some strong Pacific rim cooking here - noodle dishes, parcels of soy, ginger and snapper, okayodon, a Japanese dish of chicken and egg, a stir-fry of shrimp and asparagus.

Some bigger, 'event' dishes are included, but Granger points out that there's "a fine balance between showing off and making an effort".  You get the sense that his dinner parties are relaxed affairs. Cue a meatball dish with tamarind, veal chops with tomato and marjoram and rabbit with chorizo and green chilli.

Nothing too complicated, nothing too indulgent.  Just big, gutsy flavours.

These are not pretentious recipes, nor are they particularly difficult to cook.  They're quick, straightforward and stripped of anything unnecessary.  Lists of ingredients are generally short.

This isn't to say that there isn't finesse, rather, there isn't ebellishment where it isn't needed.

Feed Me Now is an excellent introduction to Granger's style of food, and an essential purchase for any time-starved, hungry family.

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Why does nobody eat duck eggs anymore?

Duck eggs fell out of fashion just after the Second World War when a health scare connected eating duck eggs with outbreaks of salmonella poisoning.

The evidence seemed a little thin, but the connection in the public consciousness took hold, and demand for duck eggs plummeted.  The mass producers ignored ducks in favour of the more easily farmed chicken.

Later, people forgot why they didn't buy duck eggs, they just didn't buy them, and the large scale farming methods involved in chicken egg production took control of the whole egg market.  Chicken eggs were cheaper, more convenient and didn't have that connection to salmonella, at least until Edwina Currie's infamous anti-egg crusade of the mid-1980s.

Duck eggs are still not widely available, but they're out there in farm shops, delis, whole food shops, farmer's markets and the like.  For those willing to hunt some down, the hunt is worth it.

Mine come from the local butcher, who runs his own farm, raising beef steers, pigs and chickens, along with a small flock of ducks.  Some of the 'posher' supermarkets also stock them - they cost more, and they probably aren't as fresh.  The butcher's are £1.99 for half a dozen oddly sized eggs, more than hen's eggs, but they're bigger and fresher.

A duck egg can be used as a direct substitute for a normal hen's egg.  The yolks are larger and higher in fat than a hen's egg, which makes them richer and perhaps a little 'gamey'.  They're also packed with vitamins and minerals, and provide a powerful protein boost, approximately 15% of the adult recommended daily allowance.

Duck eggs are especially useful in baking, given the higher proportion of yolk to white - you'll hear plenty of tales about the near supernatural lightness of cakes, etc - but they also make a superb omelette and lift the humble pancake to new heights.

To me, the best thing to do with a duck egg is to fry it gently in butter, and eat it with a couple of rashers of bacon, toast, some good coffee and the Sunday papers.


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Forerib of beef, roasted with beetroot

In the middle of the beef crisis in the UK during the nineties, beef joints including the animal's bones were banned.  You couldn't buy proper roasting joints anywhere.

All beef was sold off the bone, and that was that.

My dad had other ideas, and wasn't about to be scared off by a minor inconvenience such as CJD.

He knew people, he worked in the trade.

One weekend, for some family get together or other, he came home with an enormous joint, at least six or seven ribs wide, it must have weighed about four kilos, on the bone.

He'd asked the butcher for a joint prepared 'in the traditional way', and no further questions were asked.

It was magnificent, and sat in the middle of the table as we weighed up whether or not to take the risk of eating it.  The contraband beef won in the end, and it was the best beef I've ever had.

This Abel & Cole joint wasn't far off, either, and this time we benefited from our dinner being totally legal.

To roast a beef joint properly, you only need four things - a good joint, salt, pepper and an eye on the clock.

The hardest part is choosing the joint.

My cut of choice is the forerib, or rib of beef.  It comes from just above the brisket, and normally has three to five ribs left in.  The ribs are vital.  They give the joint flavour and support, protecting the tenderest of the meat from the fiercest of the heat.

The quality of the beef itself is also vital.  If you're going to roast a large joint, it should be a good one, from a cow that's been well looked after and farmed properly.

This joint was farmed in Herefordshire by a 78-year old farmer called David Powell.  It's from a Hereford steer, one of an award-winning herd headed by a 22-year old calving cow called Pru.  Abel & Cole do go a bit overboard on the provenance of their food, you may have noticed, but it's good to know the little things.

The 1.6kg joint was seasoned liberally and given twenty minutes at 220c and a further forty-five minutes at the more sedate 170c, resting for another twenty minutes afterwards.  This left the joint with a rich, pale red colour in the centre, moist and tasty.

The timings are from Hugh Fearnley Whitingstall's unparalleled River Cottage Meat.  Hugh spends five pages describing the process of roasting a joint in minute detail.  It's a joy to read something written with such knowledge and enthusiasm, but in a nutshell, Hugh's advice is to blast the meat at a high temperature for twenty to thirty minutes, then reduce the heat to a lower setting for a further fifteen minutes per half kilo for a perfect medium roast.

These timings, or anything else in River Cottage Meat for that matter, never fail.

The beef was cooked with beetroot and onions.  Beetroot is an excellent partner to beef, especially when roasted itself, with some gutsy herbs and a heavy hand with the seasoning.

Boil four or five beetroot gently in their skins for about forty minutes until just done.  Peel and halve them.

Peel and quarter a similar number of small onions, and add them to the beetroot with plenty of salt and pepper and a couple of tablespoons each of thyme and marjoram leaves.  Add a big glug of olive oil to coat the vegetables, and tuck them around the beef for the last half an hour or so of cooking, finishing off whilst the beef rests.

Slice the beef into thick slices and serve with the roasted vegetables, and some horseradish sauce or mustard. The beetroot will be warm, tender and sweet, the onions rich and caramalised, the beef rich and pink.

One last thing.  If you're going to roast a big joint of meat, make sure it's far too big.  You need to have some left over for sandwiches the next day, or even to just slice straight off the bone in the middle of the night.

Thanks to Abel & Cole for sending me this joint - your beef is superb.



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Wikio's October Top Twenty Gastronomy blogs

I've been given the chance to preview the Wikio Top Twenty UK gastronomy blogs for last month, October.

Here's the list:

1 The Guardian - Word of Mouth (=) 2 Food Stories (=) 3 Eat like a girl (=) 4 Hollow Legs (=) 5 DOS HERMANOS (+1) 6 London Eater (+3) 7 Cheese and Biscuits (-2) 8 World Foodie Guide (+2) 9 Spittoonextra (-2) 10 Tamarind and Thyme (+2) 11 Gastronomy Domine (-3) 12 Thring for Your Supper (-1) 13 Tinned Tomatoes (+3) 14 Dinner Diary (+1) 15 An American in London (+5) 16 Ambrosia and Nectar (-3) 17 The Foodie List (+1) 18 Ice Cream Ireland (-4) 19 Crumbs and Doilies Cupcakes blog (+11) 20 Domestic Goddess in Training (+6) Ranking by Wikio

These rankings are worked out using some sort of complicated algorithmic voodoo that I'm not going to pretend to understand.  Wikio explain it all here.

There are some excellent writers on this list, and I'd say it's fairly representative of the cream of British food blogging.  These twenty blogs are pretty much required reading.

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John Torode's Chicken and Other Birds

Chicken and Other Birds is the latest book from John Torode, the Australian chef behind Smiths of Smithfield and one of the presenters of the BBC's Masterchef.

The purpose of Torode's book is very simple and very clear.  He sees chicken as one of the cornerstones of a cook's repertoire.

"If you can roast a chicken, you will survive", as he puts it.

This is a collection of recipes intended to lift this most popular of meats out of the doldrums, to give people the confidence to cook it with flair and passion and, above all else, to get the most out of it.

There are chapters on soups and stocks, with recipes for a simple chicken soup with mazo balls alongside broths tinged with the influence of the Pacific rim.  Other chapters focus on salads, curries, roasts, tarts, pies and pastries, and somewhat inevitably for an Aussie chef, barbecuing.

The collection has a healthy south-east Asian edge to it in parts - Asian ingredients are much in evidence in many of the dishes, and used to great effect.  A jungle curry of guinea fowl takes a close relative of the chicken and gives it a northern Thai treatment, the flavours bordering on Chinese, hot with yellow curry paste, savoury and sweet notes from fish sauce and Shaoxing wine undercutting the heat , the dish balanced with bok choy and mint.

An inventive but easy dish.

Other examples of thoughtful cooking are everywhere.

A beautiful dish of pot-roasted pigeons with bacon and cabbage contains only a handful of ingredients, put together in a way that leaps off the page as something that's easy to do.

More daunting recipes, such as confit duck, are stripped back and shown to need little more than patience to complete with stunning results.  Pairing the newly-made confit with haricot beans, sausage and pancetta is never going to win any awards for innovation, but it's a classic combination, guaranteed to win.

There are other more complicated dishes, recipes to offer  a challenge.  Turkey pastrami involves brining and smoking in a wok, something that I doubt my smoke alarm would tolerate, but which I know I'm going to try, when everybody else is out.

The classics are all here.  Torode tells us how to roast a chicken, gives his take on the chicken sandwich (really, is there a better sandwich?) and runs through a few essential techniques, such as grilling.  A quick overview of how to joint a chicken properly is also included, something that I suspect many people don't know how to do properly. If you can joint a chicken, you can use it all, and the inside of the dust jacket has a 'beak to tail' view of what to do with a chicken.  The intention is to get the most out of the bird, to use it all.

Chicken and Other Birds is accessible, useful and has some great recipes.  It tempts you to look at the humble chicken again and want to do more with it than just roast it.

It's one of those cookbooks that's less of a celebrity chef vanity job and more of a manual, a practical guide to getting the best out of the amateur cook.  It's the type of book I want in my kitchen.

I enjoyed Torode's book enormously.

If his aim was to kindle some enthusiasm for chicken, he's succeeded, and done a thorough and thoughtful job of it, too.

Thanks to Quadrille for the review copy.




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