Monday, functional if brain-looping. Two cups of coffee continues to be too much for a baseline. A good weekend, where we ended up repotting a bunch of plants and roasting a shoulder of lamb. Organic things.
I've never cooked a joint of lamb before, and ended up cobbling together various recipes to suit what we had on hand/I was aiming for. Roughly:
- Salted the lamb the day before
- Pasted fresh rosemary and thyme with English mustard, olive oil, and a little more salt. Slashed the meat, then rubbed it with the mixture.
- The butcher had already packed the joint with some long rosemary sprigs.
- Put carrots and parsnips in a cast iron pan, poured in red wine, balsamic, and olive oil, and laid the lamb on top.
- Cooked for 4 hours at 130c, then for another 30m at 170 or so.
- Rested for 30m. Made gravy with the juices.
- Served it with some (separately) roasted vegetables and Nigella's salt and vinegar potatoes.
The lamb came out very nicely, albeit not 'melt off the bone' done. Doing it over again, I think I'd roast for more like 6 hours at the lower temperature (for a 2kg joint like the one we had).
The vegetables under it didn't come out to good, either. Too tough, and a little too acerbic for my tastes. Probably didn't need vinegar on top of the wine. Though the longer cooking time might take care of the rest.
I served it with a bottle of Bordeaux, purely by virtue of Googling what sort of wine would go well with lamb shoulder. (To be fair, it did.)
Lamb shoulder is a joint that, particularly when slow roasted to a melting tenderness until it needs no more than a spoon to take it from the bone, requires wines with an essential freshness as part of its make up to slice through the fatty meat. Rioja and red Bordeaux are classic combinations but look too to Chilean carmenère or Chianti from Italy.
https://www.thewinesociety.com/food-wine-matcher/meat-course/lamb-shoulder
All in all, an excellent time.