Rita's Culinary Trickery by Rita Konig

Author:Rita Konig
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446460306
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Butterflied lamb

Lamb is easy to cook. Breaking my own rules again, I first made butterflied lamb when I had 14 people coming to dinner and no idea how I was going to fit them all in my flat, let alone how I was going to get anything on the table for them. At four o’clock that day I was still sitting in a cafe, having a cup of tea with a friend. Another friend, who was coming to dinner that night, walked past and asked what we were going to eat. I told him that I had no idea and fortunately, as he is a restaurateur, he did have some idea of what to do in the dinner department. Fate had really come up trumps. He told me to go to the butcher, get a leg of lamb and ask them to butterfly it. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about but hoped that the butcher would. I went off to the shop and the first thing the butcher did was laugh at me when I asked for a leg of lamb to feed 14. That alarmed me slightly, until he said that lambs didn’t come that big and he could give me two legs. Once over that hurdle, I nervously muttered the butterflying part, sure that he would laugh at me again and worse: ask me what I was talking about. Amazingly, he just went ahead and removed the bone. Some people argue that all meat should be cooked on the bone for the best flavour, and they are probably right, but this is too easy to get snooty about. Being boneless is what makes this lamb so easy to cook and carve. Roast lamb when it’s on the bone seems a big deal for dinner, too much like Sunday lunch, but this is good served warm, at room temperature, in spring.

Once home, you marinade the meat. Pour some olive oil into a bowl with a few crushed cloves of garlic, rosemary, salt and pepper, put the meat in and leave it there, turning it a few times, for as long as you’ve got. If it’s only an hour, that’s better than nothing, but leave it longer if you can. Lay the meat out on a baking tray and stick it in a hot oven for about 40 minutes – it doesn’t take nearly as long as a conventional leg with a bone. The timing of this really depends on the size of the leg and also how pink you like it. When the lamb is done, take it out of the oven and let it stand for about ten minutes – put some foil over it so that it doesn’t get cold. Slice it in long slithers, put them on a platter and pour over the meat juices from the pan – this is an Italian rather than an English way to serve lamb. All you need to serve with this is a rocket salad and maybe some of those roasted new potatoes I described here.

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