food+drink

Special Roast Lamb

I’m recovering slowly from this blasted UTI, but still not entirely out of the woods. But recovered enough to cook an experimental meal.

Special Roast Lamb
[This would also work brilliantly with pork.]

No list of ingredients, you can work that out from what I write!

We had a spare leg of lamb (the way you do!) and want the ffeezer space for Christmas. This is what I did — how you do it doesn’t matter as long as the meat remains in a single piece as you’ll be rolling it up later. The joint was about 2Kg before being boned.

I carefully cut down to the bone and worked a sharp boning knife around all the bones leaving a large flat piece of lamb. Trim off any excess fat and sinews. Do not throw the bones, fat etc. away!

Finely chop a couple of cloves of garlic and a small onion (red for preference). Mix with a small packet of stuffing mix, plus salt, pepper and mixed herbs as desired, and add hot water as instructed on the packet. Leave to cool for a few minutes.

At this stage a second pair of hands will come in useful. Put the stuffing on the flattened lamb and roll it up as best you can. Yes that’s right, it will fall apart, which is why you need that second pair of hands to hold it together during the next step.

Now wrap some Parma ham round the lamb and tie it with string to stop it falling apart. The Parma ham helps hold the lamb together, protects it from drying and adds a nice edge to the meat.


If you bone the lamb well this is what it should end up looking like,
only wrapped with Parma ham. I ain’t that good!
Place in a roasting tin and drizzle some olive oil over.

Cover with foil and cook in the oven at about 180C with fan assist (200C if no fan) for about 70-90 minutes. Any extra stuffing can also be popped in the oven.

When done leave to rest for 10 minutes, then serve in slices accompanied by jacket or roast potatoes and veg of your choice (we had steamed spinach), plus if desired some mushroom sauce.

— ooOoo —
Lamb Stock
Remember all those bones an trimmings? Well you can make some super lamb stock for risotto etc.
Take a casserole (cast iron is best) and into it throw a roughly chopped onion, a few cloves of garlic and whatever other veg you need to use up (I used a rather tired fennel) also roughly chopped. Sweat this with a little olive oil on the hob, for a few minutes. Then add all the lamb trimmings & bones, seasoning and some mixed herbs. Continue cooking for a few more minutes. Now add some white wine (or wine and water) to just cover the lamb/veg mix and pop in a low oven for a couple of hours. You should end up with some clean bones and a stock. Take out the bones and any remaining lumps of fat etc.; you might also want to skim the fat off the top. Et voilà … you have some lovely rich lamb stock just ready for soup or risotto.

personal, thoughts

What Little Thing Might Change Your Life?

A few days ago Leo Babauta posted 28 Brilliant Tips for Living Life over on his Zenhabits blog. It is a compilation of tips suggested after he asked “What’s the best tip that has made your life better/easier?”.

Now some of them seem trite, some I don’t agree with and some just don’t work for me. Which is fine; that’s as it should be. Nevertheless there is a nucleus which many of us — me included! — would I think benefit from. So here’s a selection.

  • Use travel delay as opportunity to stop rather than get stressed. When the world stands still, let it.
  • Stop clinging and embrace change as a constant.
  • Try and give people the benefit of the doubt if they snap at you. Might be something going on you don’t know about.
  • Life is so much easier when you make a decision within 5 minutes. Longer than that and you get bogged down & never decide.
  • Friendship is a gift, not a possession.
  • Mostly nothing is that serious as it seems in the first moment.
  • When you think you want something, put it on the planner a month from now. When that month rolls around and you still want it, OK.
  • Smiling … seems to help with most things. 🙂
  • Expecting less or nothing, and just being. That way disappointments are nil and you are pleasantly surprised often.
  • QTIP: quit taking it personally.
  • When in doubt, take a deep breath.
quotes

Quotes

More in our occasional series of quotes we met but to which you may not have been introduced …

Household tasks are easier and quicker when they are done by somebody else.
[James Thorpe]

What we call “Progress” is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
[Havelock Ellis]

Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
[Henrik Tikkanen]

The storm will pass. The spring will come.
[Robert H Schuller]
Compare with Anthony Powell’s I’ll pass, Sir, like other days in the Army and Shakespeare’s Time and tide wait for no man.

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
[Thomas Szasz]

Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.
[Arnold H Glasow]

In love there are two things — bodies and words.
[Joyce Carol Oates]

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.
[Thomas J Watson Sr, Founder of IBM, 1874-1956]

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
[Thoughts of Angel]

Evil is about choice. Sickness is about absence of choice.
[Lindsey Fitzharris; Guardian Science Blogs; 17/12/2012]

Surely the answer to every difficult question in life is “woof”.
[Lucy Stiles on Facebook]

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
[Rod Serling]

links

What a Lot We Missed!

In our occasional (well it’s been something like three weeks since the last) series we have a really bumper crop of links to items I’ve spotted but which you may have missed — and which I think may be of interest.

First up we have an item on cracking codes, specifically in this case the easy (to us) but confusing (to our ancestors) Pigpen Cipher

And then there’s a cabal of crackers who have opened a 250-Year-Old Code to find (some variant of) freemasonry within.

Not quite a code? Well maybe it is, because this amazing 120-year-old “musical box” just so perfectly mimics a bird. Well it would be perfect if they could work out what the bird was!

And so to another amazing piece of Victorian engineering: Tower Bridge. Apparently the walkways high above the river are to get (part) glass floors, so people can look down on the bridge when it opens. I wonder how many heads will manage that one? Sadly I doubt mine will.

If a little red wine is good for you … Why you really should prefer red over white.

And talking of red, some clever chemists have been able to tweak one of the key pigments in our visual system so it is sensitive further into the infra-red. The implication is that this would give us much richer red vision. Yep that should be easy, just change the metal in the complex … oh wait there is no metal!

So yes, it’s all down to experimental science; time spent at the laboratory bench. But what about when you have an experiment that outlives you? Yep, you have to find an heir. The story of two such experiments from the same university.

Back to colour for a moment … So why is the sky blue not violet? Excellent trick if you can pull this one off!

We all know how people of Pompeii died, right? Well maybe not so fast. Some interesting perspectives both here and here.

Ash on the floor? Oh dear, you need to know how to clean your house in 15 minutes. No, I don’t believe it either!

Is it a filter? Is it a manufacturing plant? It’s a cleanroom — which is actually a plant that manufactures pure air. And it’s all done by big fans and gravity. An interesting read, especially when you consider this was one of the gateway technologies to our modern electronically connected world … some part of whatever device you’re reading this one was made in a cleanroom.

Ten well-known facts that are nothing of the sort.

But then, once upon a time, we didn’t know how to make cheese either. Seems we learnt longer ago than was thought, like 7500 years ago!

Which is all probably down to some variant of the restless genes which have (and still do) driven some to explore further afield.

Meanwhile back at home in the UK there’s been a project running for the last 10-ish years to photograph and put online images of every oil painting which is owned by the nation. All 211,861 of them! And it has finally achieved it’s aim. Telegraph article about the project. And the Your Paintings website itself which is free for anyone to use. What a fantastic achievement and a wonderful resource!


So from the sublime to the prosaic and worse …

Amusing snippet detailing the top ways we (well Americans) manage to accidentally (one assumes) injure their genitals. Be warned, boys and girls: don’t play with your genitals!

And at long last the UN has got round to approving an agreement on banning female genital mutilation. I don’t care how ancient and how supposedly important a ritual this is, it should have been stamped on long, long ago.

Mind you it seems that pubic hair is in even greater danger extinction than we thought. Oh dear! As if they don’t have anything better to do with themselves.

After all of which we probably all need a bit of stress relief.

Happy popping!