A Traveling Lamb

It's always interested me how you can take a few main ingredients and take them to quite different culinary destinations depending on small differences in preparation, seasoing, and accompiaments. Last night we took a boned leg of lamb out on tour.

This lamb decided to be Greek, but we've taken legs of lamb to France, India, and England, too. We seasoned the boned lamb (it was a very small, infant one) with a bit of olive oil, sea salt, ground pepper, rosemary, and Greek oregano, then seared it well on both sides in an oven-suitable saute pan. When both sides were quite brown, it went into the oven for about 20=25 minutes at 350 degrees to finish cooking (timing depends on the lamb's size, of course).

To accompany our lamb to Greece, we started with the Cold Yogurt and Dill soup we've mentioned in an earlier post and plated it with a rice pilaf cooked in chicken broth and seasoned with a few toasted pine nuts and some butter and pepper. It went to the table with a salad of shredded romaine, grape tomatoes, cucumber slices, and bits of feta cheese, all dressed with a vinaigrette blended with a crushed clove of garlic and pinches of fresh chopped mint and oregano.

We finished with some fruit, but if we hadn't started with the yogurt soup I might have picked yogurt drizzled with honey.

If you'd rather take your lamb to India, you might pat it with a mix of garlic and ginger paste and season the pilaf with some curry powder. We'd probably serve that with raita (yogurt with grated or chopped cucumber, seasoned with a bit of cayenne or cumin) and a chutney -- Major Gray's out of a bottle or Amy's Tomato Chutney out of the everlasting jar in the fridge.

We usually save the French lamb for a larger crowd, patting it with olive oil, rosemary and garlic before browning and roasting it. We usually accompany it with pommes gratin dauphinoise (a Julia Child specialty which also appears, in some version, in nearly every French cookbook). It's basically thinly sliced potatoes, first lightlly cooked in milk, then layered into a buttered casserole with salt and pepper, bits of butter, and milk or cream (to about half the depth of the potatoes) and baked until golden brown. There are lots of variations, from additing garlic, shredded Gruyere cheese, or other ingredients, to skipping the pre-cooking of the potatoes (which I consider essential). We'd serve another French style cooked vegetable, perhaps string beans, and a classic green salad with vinaigrette dressing. You can pick the dessert.

An English version might take the seasoned (probably just salt, pepper and perhaps a bit of garlic) lamb from browning to oven and accompany it with oven roasted potatoes, glazed carrots, string beans, and a green salad with quartered small tomatoes (the English call them Salad Tomatoes). It would be served as a mid-day Sunday dinner, and a very good one.

In all cases, try not to slice the part of the lamb that isn't going to get eaten for this meal. It keeps better in one piece. Then you can choose to use it up as a delectable addition to a composed salad, an ingredient to a curry, or the basis of Shepherd's pie. We'll talk about all of those soon.