So, I’m a big art fan and love Damien Hirst and his cool, original and not at all plagaristic or derivative artwork, and I also love Nigella Lawson so I was all thinking, “why on Earth haven’t I cooked something for Charles Saatchi, the middle part of this Venn Diagram?”
But what to cook for Charles? Looking to the interwebs, it appears he knows how to treat a nice bit of meat…
Pity that doesn’t extend to his ex-wife 😦
So with this in mind I pop off to my professional chef’s kitchen fridge and return with the following:
An amazing shoulder of lamb, which I have held up to the… uhhh… light so you can get a good look..
Next, I choose some mixed root vegetables and have a bit of trouble opening the difficult celophane wrapping so have to use a bit of force:
And transfer the lamb and vegetables to a roasting tray…
Oh yeah, so super sexy.
And I’m thinking here that I need to add a bit of liquid to the ingredients so my lamb stays nice and moist so alight on the following:
A can of Stella Artois and a bottle of red.
The final step is to transfer the lamb, vegetables and wine, beer and some thyme (just added) to a oven at 180c for 20 mins….after which I will turn down the heat to 115c for 2 hours:
As I’m whiling away the 2 hours I decide to prepare some salt:
Anyway, after spending hours chopping up salt and drinking beer, looking out of windows and crushing peanuts, I remove the lamb from the oven:
Done to a turn!
Next up, I make a jus from the remains in the tray and as carefully as possible fashion this astonishing work of art:
annnnnd how’s it taste?
The lamb is incredibly delicate and the vegetables are wonderfully caremelised. If I’m being critical, the sauce is a fraction bitter from the beer and could have been richer. Maybe I could have roasted for a bit longer to extract more flavour from the rendered fat or used more wine (I used half a bottle, prob should have used a whole one, but I drank the other half, like, obviously).
Overall, Charles would be super proud, and that’s cool cos I wouldn’t want him smashing up the place in furious anger because of my culinary shortcomings…
So, if you have cooked with roast lamb recently or if you don’t think I treated the meat with the respect it deserved you might want to head over to my facebook page to chat with other food lovers etc.
And Twitter
And maybe bashing around on huffpost
Another goddam foodblog 