Lovely Leg of Lamb....

So I told you about the big reduced haul from yesterday but I forgot to take a picture of the leg of lamb that I got - but no matter - you get to see it today!
The reduced tag shows you that I got this leg of lamb at just slightly under 57% less than normal price. We don't have it very often - leg of lamb - unless it's a special holiday or like this on offer or reduced. But at this price I really couldn't pass it up. For the two of us this would be two meals at least. So I dutifully oiled it a bit, topped it with some sea salt flakes and some cracked pepper. I then made some slits in the meat for some garlic - just to add the flavour - I save it for my next meal as its usually a bit too much for even me (and I love garlic!).
It cooked for about an hour and I then tossed in some potatoes just as they are - a bit cut up so that they all cook for the same amount of time. I again salted and peppered them as usual. By now there was enough oil/juices in the pan to coat the potatoes which I did toss them around a bit before slipping it back into the oven.
This is the remains - we were both too hungry to get a before picture! But look at those lovely brown bits on the baking tray....what to do? I must admit I try to eke out as much as possible from everything I buy or make. Rather like a restaurant does - which is a good lesson in life.

Anyway, when I roast something there is always some good flavour bits on the tray. Now back to how to rescue this and make it usable? Almost always I have some sort of steamed veggie for dinner but if not plain old water will do. In the case of tonight we had steamed green beans. So I remove all the good stuff I can to one bowl and to the tray I add a bit of the veggie water. Not a lot just enough to begin scrapping up the brown bits with a wooden spoon. I then turn on the burner (to medium-low) and continue to scrape as I go along and soon you have a lovely sauce of gravy like stuff. I pour this into another bowl and then again do another lot of water to the pan and again get up any of the brown bits that didn't come off the first time. Below is a picture of what I got from the pan with all those lovely brown bits - what a deep brown colour! FLAVOUR!!
It depends on the meat I've roasted as sometimes I have to do this three times (usually with chicken). And before you ask me why why used veggie water - why not? I've cleaned my veggies (most are organic if possible) and as most anyone can see you toss that stuff down the drain - it has flavour in it! If I don't have a use for the water right then I will give it to my plants who certainly love having the extra vitamins. I must admit I don't do this with potato or cauliflower water - too smelly! I suppose it wouldn't matter if it went on outside plants but we don't have a yard here in the flats.

Now what do I do with this lovely brown liquor? If I making a soup - I use it there. I normally refrigerate the bowl and skim off the fat on top as usually with lamb there might be a lot (depending on the cut) but the rest is great for a soup. But for this liquid I'm going to make a lamb/barley leftover dinner so it will help infuse the barley when cooking it. If I'm not making something like this with the leftovers I will save it for a risotto or something like that where I want a flavour booster. You can even freeze it and add to other batches if you have the room. I usually don't have the freezer room UK freezers are like 1/4 the size of American ones.

As with most things you have to do a bit of planning and preparation but once you have begun the process it is so simple to keep up with it. So the next time you roast something remember - there is flavour in them there bits! Enjoy!

Christmas on a budget...

Well again more delays in not posting but honestly life is to be lived and time for posting is all but gone when I am working. I have a number of projects which are taking up my time and that leaves me with little time to go on the computer much less document it with pictures. I see so many great blogs that I figure one more won't make or break life one tiny bit.

First, I'll include a picture or two of our snowy day about one week ago - naturally all BEFORE Christmas! The first picture is from our living room that over looks the main drag here in Southend - the dreaded A13! This photo was snapped after about 1/2 an hour of the white stuff beginning - you can see it just came down!

This next photo is from the kitchen over looking the roundabout. Normally you can see to the pier and beyond (which is Kent) but not this day! The drops on the window I hadn't noticed until I looked at the photos but it's a good contrast considering this is my mobile phone doing the pictures! I am working on getting a better camera to have better pictures...so as they say watch this space!

Sadly we are now without the snow - it melted within about a week. We've had a few days of flurries but nothing that stuck. The temperatures however, have been quite low and I'm sure the rest of England is still digging out. News reports now show the Eastern Seaboard of the US is getting hammered. No rest for the wicked!

Now, onto some cooking. Every year for Christmas we have our annual 'hunt' for dinner. I say hunt but do not mean literally I go out hunting with a gun but rather my credit card! Each year since I have moved here I go out to the stores on Christmas Eve to find something for Christmas Day dinner.

In years past we have had just about everything you can imagine from ham to duck. One year I got an organic/free-range goose and when preparing it found all this fat in the cavity. I didn't know what to do with it - well thankfully Julia Child had covered this in her Mastering the Art of French Cooking - which I did have. I rendered all the fat down (and trust me there was plenty!) that I had enough fat for the whole year for my roasties!

So anyway, back to my Christmas hunt. We went out on the 23rd and bought our 'just in case' dinner (meaning if we found nothing this would be our main course). In addition to that we found our Christmas Eve dinner which really wasn't cooked by my standards but ended up being quick and as always thrifty!
So the store Gods left me some salmon fish cakes, some courgettes, which I just plainly grilled in the grill pan and I made my sour cream and lemon pasta (basically pasta with sour cream added and some lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper to make a cream sauce for the pasta).
As you can see - the fish cakes cost me £0.69p and the courgettes cost me £1.09 but they were organic and I had already used one of them for a previous meal (coincidently on that day they had normal courgettes reduced too - same price so I opted for the organic kind as always) . The pasta I already had but it's just the quill kind so was about £0.25p for the 500 gram bag of which I only cooked 125 grams for our dinner. The sour cream/fresh lemon I already had and always have this stuff on hand so minimal amount of money. If you want to even count in the cost of fuel to cook the dinner, etc. we could go as high as £4.00 for the whole meal for us two. I dare say that for us is about our usual in cost as I'm very fond of going to the store two to three times a week just to get my veg and find the reduced bargains.

I also found some organic chicken livers reduced from £2.99 to £0.99p. Now I'm not a pate kind of gal but J loves the stuff so I got the livers for him and put aside some to put in my roast chickens but the rest I decided to make him some pate. I've never made it and didn't have any recipe to hand but just made something up which I thought sounded good.

I took an onion and which I fried in a pan with some olive oil. They got a bit of colour on them (not much) and I then added the chicken livers and seasoned with some salt and pepper. I cooked them until just pinky inside and added a clove of garlic (minced) and cooked for about another minute. I then added some brandy which made a nice sauce and continued for about another minute. I then put it all in the food processor and whizzed up until it looked like pate. Decanted into a jar I had saved and topped it off with some ghee that I melted. This picture I took when I had put it into the fridge and the ghee stuck to the top of the lid so I did a repair job on it but it was probably just too full to begin with. Anyway, verdict is that it's pretty good for a first time at pate!
OK - so now for the final Christmas dinner - what did we have? Well normally we go to two or even three different stores it really just depends on my mood and if we find anything. This year we went to the Co-op which is literally just around the corner from the flat. We went just shortly after 4pm as we've learned from past experience - don't leave it too late or you'll end up with nothing.

So we arrived there and began to scope it out. We found our favourite custard there reduced which I had nothing made to go with it but got because it's the only one I'll eat and just couldn't resist it. Continuing down we found some yoghurt reduced - nothing to rock your world but for us yoghurt is a dessert in this house.

Then we rounded the next aisle where the meat was and as luck would have it - it was full of those lovely orange reduced stickers. It is amazing how you can train your eye for these stickers. Each store has their own colour so in the Co-op it's orange, Sainsbury's and Tesco it is yellow/white, Morrison's it is yellow, and Waitrose it is red. I'm like a tuning fork - I hum these frequencies!

I know if we hadn't gotten anything the previous day for our dinner we would have been hard pressed to find anything so of course now that we were prepared it was a feast before us! All manner of roasts were reduced, pork roasts from £1.50, turkey crowns from £3.00 and lamb from £7.50. After evaluating what we already had at home and what was on offer that we would like to eat we decided to get the leg of lamb. Mainly because we already had some ham at home for our 'planned' dinner and we love our lamb! I also got some wild Alaskan salmon fillets for £1.50 for another meal - those went into the freeze.

So lamb it was - normally it was £15.00 but we got it for just slightly over £7.00 for 1.5 kgs! I already had potatoes at home so that would work, and we had peas in the freeze so that was our veg done. So there was my dinner and then some because it was big enough for left-overs for at least one other meal if not two.

So how did I prepare this lamb? Well I kept it in the container it was sold in and added some freshly squeezed lemon juice (about two lemons) with some olive oil and loads of minced garlic. I let it set out for about 2-3 hours marinating in this concoction and every time I was in the kitchen I just turned the leg over to get all the juices into the meat.

I then pan roasted some herbs de Provence, coriander seeds. When fragrant I put them into my mortar and pestle and added pepper and salt and ground them up with a few kaffir lime leaves. I then plastered this all over the leg of lamb and added some more garlic to give it a nice coating.
Into the oven for an hour to roast at which point I took it out and added some cut up potatoes which I then doused in olive oil, some more lemon juice and salt and pepper. Back into the oven for another hour or so until done.
No, those potatoes are not rotten - they are some of the leftovers from yet another reduced purchase earlier in the month that I got - purple potatoes. They were just lovely and the colour - well I don't know how to say this but the colour was all the way through and it really did make you do a double-take on what you were eating. Here is the final picture of the roast as it came out of the oven.
And then here is the plate of it along with my annual egg nog that I make each year but I do vary the recipe in as much as I don't use the alcohol called for but use dark rum instead. I'm not sure why I prefer it to the others which I have tried - it's just how I like it.
So there you have it - dinner on a budget but really it wasn't difficult nor did it break the bank. I used the left overs on Boxing day. All I did was cut up an onion and add some olive oil. I sautéed that for about a minute then added the potatoes chopped up into cubes. I left that to cook for a few minutes while I chopped up the meat and again added that. Cooked it until warmed through and that with some glazed carrots was another meal. I still had enough to make a lunch meal and saved the bone to throw into a thing I call garbage soup...yet another posting as this one is so long! So do stop by for another adventure in culinary dining on a budget!

Marinating and inventing...

I got an organic leg of lamb the other day at the store (reduced of course!) and was stuck for something new to do with it other than roast it like usual. So quick inventory of the fridge and larder yielded some possibilities and I soon got to work.

I decided to marinate the meat since it was a work night and I don't have time to do much when getting home but put dinner in the oven and get it quickly to the table. So decided that I had a few lemons - always good for juice and zest. I also had some garlic and a bit of onion. Again just chopped it roughly - pretty doesn't matter in a marinade. I then got out the olive oil - an essential! Then some fresh herbs from the window sill containers - some chervil, parsley and coriander. Oh yeah, and some dried herbs too - oregano (my fresh kind has only just come up), some ground coriander and finally a few coriander seeds as well.

So into a zip lock bag goes the leg of lamb, juice of three lemons and zest, some garlic, onions, good few glugs of olive oil, and herbs. All get put back in the fridge for the day (I did this in the morning before work) and turned at lunch time (yes, I work so close to home I can often come home for lunch!).

When I got home it all got dumped into a dish and into a hot oven for about 80 minutes or so and it was lovely. The lemons did their job and it was permeated throughout but not in a over-powering kind of way. Lamb is usually quite tender but roasting it usually if done too well is tough. this was just right.

My point in all of this is - there was no recipe. I see people all the time (telly especially) going through a recipe and such and really it is about your own tastes and what you like. I just put together things I thought would work - worst case is you have a crap dinner - but you learned!

I have had only one real disaster - the fruit disaster (see previous post). Others might have more - I do too I just don't always reveal them. But that you try and can laugh (usually at a later date!) then that is half the battle. I might recount some day the petit four disaster - but it was an editable disaster! I'm not quite at the laugh stage!

BTW, earlier in the week I went with the librarians who buy our promotional items for the libraries. Our title for this month's promotion was 'Food for Thought' - quite apt. Anyway, I went as 'cookery book' advisor. Translated that meant I got to pick the cookery books. I also got to help getting some of the fiction stock as well. I had a blast going through the books and deciding what was good/bad. I only wish we had more money - but alas we made do. Enjoy!