Heartwarming Lamb Shanks and Potato Mash

Although our Autumn temperatures are still sitting around a comfortable 19 degrees (celsius) at night, the cooler change is definitely noticeable… Especially as we’ve also been experiencing some wet weather as well.

So we both felt like a hearty and delicious meal tonight… And decided on lamb shanks in a tomato and rosemary base.  Cooked on a low heat for about four hours… And we were left with pure bliss for dinner!

Easy to make and also quite affordable – especially as we are using the leftover sauce tomorrow night to add to our pasta dish.  Stay tuned for that!

 

Moroccan Lamb Cutlets with Bruschetta

This is an easy meal to prepare and cook, plus very delicious!!

We made bruschetta for a small entrée using a bread stick, cherry tomatoes, little onions and mushrooms.  The lamb cutlets were seasoned with Moroccan spices and served with a sweet potato mash, asparagus and the bruschetta topping.  So easy but so tasty!

Roast Lamb With Vegetables

Poppit – Last night, we had my family over for dinner and for something special, we thought we’d make the ultimate favourite family meal, a roast.  We chose to make roast lamb and spent the afternoon preparing the vegetables and seasoning the lamb before putting everything into the Weber and BBQ to cook.  Now, you’d think that something involving just roasting meat and veg would be a simple task… it probably should be!  But as mentioned in our very first post, https://cookingwithapuppet.wordpress.com/2010/03/13/cooking-with-a-puppet-an-introduction/, we only have a Sunbeam Pizza “Oven” which doesn’t even fit a whole pizza let alone a roast and full trays of veggies!

We didn’t let this stop our feast preparations and we set up the BBQ with a boosted-up tray so that the veggies wouldn’t be touching the plate where they would risk being burnt.  The two roast lambs went into the Weber and everything seemed to be going smoothly for the first hour after which time, the gas bottle for the BBQ ran out.  We frantically decided that the lamb would probably keep cooking as the weber was still hot and changed the bottles over… but it seemed that the BBQ had just decided to stop working all together and would only produce a tiny flame (definitely not worthy of heating up an entire BBQ).

I quickly ran inside, switched on the pizza oven and as the lamb was already on its way to being done and had shrunk in size, we squeezed them into the little oven and switched the veggies over to the Weber.  Once again, everything seemed to be going well until a burning smell wafted in from outside where the veggies had begun to burn as they were now sitting directly over the flame.

Although there was quite a bit of drama involved in the cooking, everything turned out pretty well (minus a few burnt pieces of sweet potato).  The meat was very tender and the rosemary, garlic and sea salt seasoning really gave it a nice flavour.  The family all agreed that it was delicious – but don’t families always say that?

 The veggies prepared and waiting to be cooked

Almost forgot to take a photo of the meal!  Excuse the poor presentation and nibble from the side – by this stage, we just wanted to eat!

Fine-Ripened Tomato & Moroccan Lamb Cutlets

Puppet’s Creative Cooking – Monday Night

Entrée

Fine-ripened Tomato with Bocconcini & Baby Basil
and a Balsamic Dressing

 

Main Course

Moroccan Lamb Cutlets with home-made potato wedges, baby spinach
& leek with rosemary and wine.

 

Poppit’s Review:

This was absolutely delicious!  I’m usually very picky about eating meat off bones and will only nibble close to the bone, but this time I was getting all the meat off that I possibly could!  The Moroccan cutlets had such a beautiful flavour and were really complimented by the chosen vegetable sides.
We’re both loving leek at the moment and this was a nice spin on the usual grilled leek that we have had before.