Irish Spring Lamb

Is there a greater family meal to sit down to other than the traditional roast, I think not! My family and I love having a roast with all the trimmings and not just at the weekend. Once there is some gravy with it the kids absolutely devour it, including the dreaded carrots! It's usually a roast chicken but once in a while we will have beef or lamb. Spring is in the air so a juicy leg of lamb was on the cards. I recently bought Nigel Slater's Real Cooking and a lovely recipe caught my eye so I decided to test it out.

This is what you will need:

1 leg of lamb
6 large potatoes
6 cloves of garlic
50g butter
Sprigs of rosemary
Salt
Olive oil

Preheat oven to 230 degrees
Cut unpeeled and washed potatoes into slices and place in bottom of roasting tin that has a rack
Drizzle with olive oil, salt and dab butter on top and scatter some salt
Pierce the fat of the lamb with the tip of a sharp knife and insert into each hole a sprig of rosemary and a sliver of garlic
Rub some olive oil all over the lamb leg
Place on roasting tin rack directly over the potatoes so that all the flavour will be absorbed into them
Place in oven for 20 minutes before turning oven down to 200 degrees
Cook for 15 minutes per 500g so approximately 1 hour, this will give delicious rosy pink meat
Remove lamb from the oven and allow it to rest
Turn up the oven again to crispen up the potatoes

I served this with some lovely minty couscous which is such an easy side. Simply add a stock jelly to 200ml of boiling water and stir into 200g of couscous. Leave for five minutes. Add some crispy fried onions and some chopped up fresh mint leaves and fluff up with a fork. Serve at room temperature.

Use the juices from the resting lamb as a base for your gravy. We are not huge fans of mint sauce in our house but a tablespoon of it added to gravy is a must for serving with lamb. Simply warm lamb juices, add vegetable stock jelly, some water, a tablespoon of flour, a tablespoon of mint sauce and stir well until thickened.

Oven bake some sliced carrots with a couple of tablespoons of orange juice for the ultimate roast dinner! Very little tidying up to do and only one dirty pot and maybe some gravy streaked faces to clean......

This is my entrant into the Very Good Recipes St Patricks Challenge, find out more here: http://verygoodrecipes.com/saint-patrick-challenge
One of the judges is our very own  http://www.cakesbakesandotherbits.blogspot.com/ so hopefully Colette will bring it home for the Irish!

Happy St Patricks Day!