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Welcome to French Food
Focus. The name describes the intent of this blog. I'll focus on food
and because I live in rural I hope you enjoy my ramblings about rural France!
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This is our village. Our house is the white one at the top right. |
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Baaaa...
A tale of two lambs!
Yesterday the ladies went out and bought two legs of
spring lamb for dinner. The idea was that with six of us one wouldn't be
enough. No problem with that as in my opinion there's no such thing as too
much lamb. We decided that we'd try a little experiment as to cooking the
lamb.
My friend Leo who is a formidable cook would cook
one leg his way while I'd cook the the leg my way. Not a competition, just
an opportunity to compare both methods side by side. Its not often that
ones cooks two legs of lamb at the same time.
Here's the two legs ready for oven. Mine's in the
red roasting pan and Leo's at the back in the fancy French roasting tin. Note the bone at the back of Leo's leg. That's going to be a treat for Rupert, our standard poodle.
Leo did his as follows: First he butterfly's his leg and carefully trims it. Then he makes a marinade with both regular Dijon mustard and coarse grain mustard plus fresh rosemary. The marinade is spread over the lamb and allowed to rest for a couple of hours. Its then roasted at 160 degrees C until the internal temperature reaches 140 degrees C. It then rests for 10-15 minutes before carving. Here's a close up of Leo's lamb ready for oven. Really looks good doesn't it? My technique was to tunnel bone my leg and trim it. Inside the tunneled part I placed rosemary, garlic and anchovies (just a couple of filets). I then trussed the leg into a fairly neat shape, cut some slits on the outside and placed more anchovy filets into the slits. Slivers of garlic were placed in some deep cuts. (you can just see one between the two anchovy slits.) Pepper and more rosemary, but no salt as the anchovies have plenty. Here's my lamb in close up: You can just see the anchovy in the slits if you look closely. I roasted at 140 degrees C for a much longer time than Leo, but ended up with the same internal temperature. Also, the same resting time. The results? Two absolutely delicious legs of lamb. It was hard to say one was better or worse than the other since they were both good. You'll just have to try both ways to see which is your personal preference. I did cheat and combine the pan juices from both roasts to make the gravy. This also was good over the potatoes and other vegetables. Overall a really nice meal. Oh! By the way we had fresh asparagus with Hollandaise sauce as a starter. Life is good.
We were also having another comparison going on with
this meal. That was of wine. Our Niece is getting married here in June and
lamb will feature in the Wedding Dinner. She wants a St Emillion to go
with it so her father had bought a couple of 'Grand Cru's' to sample
before ordering the full quantity of bottles. This stuff is hard work you know, but somebody has to do it. Don't they?
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