Roasting

Day 6 today. D was amazed. And very excited that we're adding in new foods from Monday. You know the song that goes: "I got cocaine, runnin' around in my brain... right on.... right on, right on ,right on..." or something similar? Well D changed it up a bit and was singing it on the train on the way back to Melbourne today from an overnight Daylesford sojourn. His version goes a little like like this:

I got brown rice runnin' around in my brain... Brown rice... brown rice, brown rice, brown rice...

Accompanied by excited bopping movements.

On Thursday we roasted a 1/2 leg of lamb. We decided that the 10 minutes it takes to fry a lamb chop and steam some vegies was just too long, and that we should just roast some lamb so we could steam some veg in 5 and then reheat some lab. Or eat it cold... Also, it's probably not healthy to be eating lamb fried in lamb fat at least once and mostly twice a day. Much better to have roast lamb.

As often happens in our house, we turned to Stephanie Alexander for advice. Her invaluable Cook's Companion is a bible of which foods go together, the basics of selecting and storing foods, and different ways to cook various ingredients. We flicked through to Lamb. Lamb goes with beans - good to know. Too bad if it didn't. While she has a lovely 7 hour roast recipe, Stephanie's instructions for a basic roast lamb go a little like this:

Heat oven to 220 degrees C.

Roast lamb for 10 - 25 mins per 500g depending on how well cooked you like it. We opted for about 20 mins, which meant a roasting time of 60 mins in total for our 1.5kg half-leg.

To roast the lamb, set it straight onto the oven rack, with a pan below it. The pan should be filled with about 2cm of water and topped up as necessary throughout the roasting. This allows the fat to drip from the lamb into the water, which prevent it from burning. In our case, this had definite advantages that I will mention later.

Baste the lamb with the collected juices "several times" throughout the cooking time. I did it twice. The lamb still tasted awesome, but could probably have benefited from a higher basting frequency.

Turn the temperature down to about 200C after 30 minutes.

I actually forgot about the lamb for a while and pulled it out of the oven 13 minutes later than planned. Oops. In choosing our cooking time we had opted for "reasonably well cooked". I was a rather worried that it might have crossed over to well cooked, or worse still, over cooked. It was in fact a little pink still right in the middle, and ranged out from there. Very lovely and tender.

By the end of the cooking time the pan juices had cooked down to a rich jus (aren't I a swanky foodie?), topped with a fair puddle of liquid lamb fat. This proved rather useful as I alluded to earlier. I allowed this mix to cool and then scraped off the lamb fat into a container, and poured the jus into a jar. At present we do not have any fats or oils to cook things in, so having a little lamb fat aside is a handy thing for frying. Lamb chops have plenty of their own fat, but we cooked lamb steaks the other day and needed some extra fat to fry them in. The jus may come in handy to flavour things. In particular we are introducing brown rice on Monday and having something to add a little flavour to it will be nice. It'll be just like chicken rice, but with lamb instead! Mmm, chicken rice...