Fall-back Favourites: Roast Leg of Lamb

When I'm pressed for time, I have a range of meals that I make without having to think about the details. Chop chop and in the pot - curries, stir-fries, etc. So in my new series of Fall-back Favourites, I will note the details of some of these recipes where measurements are open to interpretation, and effort is minimised.

First up, a classic leg of lamb. As an Australian, I take pride in my preparation of lamb, and now that my kitchen is equipped with excellent crock pots, fats and spices, my roasts are unbelievably tasty, even without using sauces or elaborate dressing techniques.

Secret ingredient: organic, grass-fed lamb! I imagine that grain-fed/finished lamb needs quite a lot of dressing up to mask the flavour of rank chemicals and tasteless meat, but pure lamb, fresh from Farmer Dan's farm is the pivotal ingredient. The preparation and cooking technique is to enhance the flavour, not change or mask it.

You will also need: coconut oil, bacon grease or other animal fat, dried or fresh rosemary, dried basil, fresh or dried garlic, salt.


Method:

1. Pre-heat your oven to moderate (150 deg C).

2. Place leg of lamb in a pot with a lid - it needs to be big enough to house the lamb comfortably, with space all around the leg.

3. Melt your fats, and combine with the herbs and spices.

4. Rub your seasoning all over the lamb, including the underside and under any flaps of loose fat. If you want to cut strips across the fat so that the seasoning reaches the meat, you may. I don't bother when preparing grass-fed meat.

5. Cover pot and place in oven for a couple of hours. You can leave it for longer if you need to - just lower the temperature to 100 deg C.

6. For the last ten minutes, remove the lid and raise heat to 200 deg C so that the fat on the roast sizzles and crisps.

7. Remove from oven and allow the roast to rest for 10 minutes in the pot, before removing roast and placing on a wooden board. Be ready for the juices - catch them if you can.

8. Carve and serve the meat, drizzling with fats and seasoning left in the pot. You could add some cauliflower rice to the pot to soak up the juice, but this is too fiddly for my fall-back plans.

Et voila!

Writing Home

I'm back Down Under, after two long-yet-too-short weeks over in rainy-then-finally-sunny Canada. We ended up with some blissful weather whilst staying at the family cottage in Quebec, lounging lakeside and soaking up the Vitamin D. The weather wasn't a big deal to the Aussies in our company, so we delighted in watching panicked Canadians setting up Emergency Cooling Stations in downtown Ottawa in order to survive the scorching 33 degree heat! Bwahahahahaa...

I don't have an in-depth report to make on Canadian farming practices and whatnot since my plans to visit Dobson's Grass-Fed Beef farm fell through, and when we arrived at Bearbrook Game Meats, we were greeted with a bunch of freezers and a cashier who clearly had little idea about the food she was selling. So much for the contact I had arranged via email. I still bought up a range of products to sample, but overall it was over-priced and not terribly fresh. Dobson's beef was pretty good, equal to the standard of grass-fed beef I get from Farmer Dan. I also tried some lamb from Canreg Station Farm & Pasture Dairy via their stand at the Landsdowne Market in Ottawa, but it really wasn't impressive. It also cost the same amount as a family meal deal from a pizza restaurant I saw advertised on TV whilst I was eating the lamb chop for breakfast. Not nice. But hey - at least Ottawa is heading in the right direction. If only the majority of stand operators at the market would lose their smug holier-than-thou attitudes and learn some actual customer service skills - but I guess that's what you can get away with when you're one of only a few suppliers feeding a growing demand.

Photo time!

Some of the colourful haul after the market in Ottawa and the trip to Bearbrook Game Meats:



I took over the kitchen a couple of times to make some delicious primal meals. My famous curry made an appearance, as well as a frittata (shown here before being topped with whipped up eggs and baked)


and some almond-crusted salmon fillets with an improvised Spinach & Cashew Pesto sauce (yum!!), served with a sauteed salad with chorizo slices.


I tried frogs legs for the first time - meh.


The view on the way into Bearbrook Game Meats:


We popped over to Vancouver for the last couple of days of our holiday, spending time with family on Bowen Island. Gorgeous weather, and gorgeous people - I've missed small town living! Before leaving the mainland I stopped in at Capers Whole Foods Market - I am in love! I think I could live in Vancouver - it is just like Melbourne, after all! I just might have to fly back to Australia when it started getting too cold though...

Back in chilly Melbourne (though we managed to neatly avoided the longest 'cold snap' in Melbourne's history - yay!), school has resumed, I'm trying to normalise my body clock, and I'm doing yoga twice a week to make up for the missed sessions (though I was moved out of the beginner's room and into the main studio last night, and now I am SORE! Their Sun Saluation regime is intense - I was sweating in under 2 minutes - and to whichever yogi thought up 'The Archer' seated series: my buttocks want to punch you in your beatific face).

I have a lot of reading to catch up on, although it seems like most of it is based on the latest debunking of The China Study, as though any of us were still paying attention to the biased report on epidemiological studies from the past... But hey, if it helps bring more attention to the dangers of wheat, at least, then that's not going to hurt anyone. I'm still sharing any articles I think everyone should read, so if you do subscribe to my shares, there's a flood of stuff coming your way!

A recipe for my Spinach & Cashew Pesto Sauce will be coming your way when I get a chance to make it again, since my photos sucked (bloody iPhone) and I've forgotten the proportions I used of each ingredient. Any excuse to make it again, huh?

And now that I've been thinking about salmon, I'm going to have to make some sashimi for dinner... Good night!

Meet The Meat Makers - Farmer Dan!

After a debacle with my seafood merchant (essentially, I asked him what his vacuum packs were made of since they made some of my fish smell toxic, and he decided that since I wasn't happy, he'd rather not sell fish to me! Um, what?), I've happily taken my business elsewhere, although now I'm supporting a larger business instead of my preferred family-owned company. My first delivery will arrive tomorrow, but I'm not expecting anything more than what I'd get were I to use Coles Online... If anyone in Melbourne knows of a market-direct delivery service for wild-caught seafood, let me know!

Organic Direct has been very good to me, providing me with beef, lamb and chicken with their once-per-month deliver service. However, it was hard to know how much I would need to order, and would end up running low, and have to supplement from the local, pricey butcher... Cut to the end - it just wasn't convenient.

I had been keen to make a direct-to-farm connection for quite a while, but since I prefer to use the Internet, and farmers aren't always great at maintaining an online presence, I struggled to find a farm that inspired me. However, a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across Gippsland Lean Beef, now run through The Farmers Market by Farmer Dan. As he espouses via his site, he believes in farms that maintain very high standards of sustainability, nurturing and nourishment. His animals are humanely raised and treated, given access to range freely in uncontaminated pastures, allowed to feed on grasses and are not supplemented by grains at any point, free of hormones, antibiotics and pesticides. And the added bonus - this "beyond organic" approach is not only the healthiest and most environmentally-friendly option around, but he even manages to offer his customers affordable prices thanks to his choice not to purchase organic certification! His site also draws on supplementary supply from other like-minded beef and lamb farmers that meet his strict criteria, so it's great to know I'm supporting a community directly with my purchases.


Farmer Dan (above, left) & I had an email back & forth before I made my first order (which you can view in its enormity in my previous post), and here is his answer to my big question:

GGP: So what's the difference between your product & what's certified as 'organic' in the Australian market today?

The difference between us and organic is quite simple. We grow our cattle and lamb naturally in a free range environment without the use of hormones, antibiotics or rumen manipulators.

1. Our prices are much cheaper.

2. We do not use grains to finish our cattle – We finish them on pasture. The rumen of cattle is not designed for grain but for pasture. Grain is an unnatural method of fattening cattle. We grow our cattle using natural methods. If you use grain you must use a rumen manipulator.

3. Certain parts of the organic standard allow for exemptions which we don’t agree should be allowed.

4. You purchase cattle from someone else that have had chemical on them and keep them on your farm for a period of time and they are classified as organic – this is not right.

5. You can use Gibberelic acid to spray on your pasture to make it grow quicker and then feed it to your cattle and you are still organic - this is wrong.

6. The organic standard does not go far enough in the way animals are treated throughout the production process.

7. Have a look at the organic standard and you might be surprised.

Of course, we would easily make the standard. What stops us is the cost. We have to pay very large fees to register and then they want a gross percentage of our turnover. I object to this. This is the reason organic products are very expensive. There are a group of people setting a standard that they perceive to be right and they want a gross percentage of my turnover. To them it is a business proposition. They make money to keep themselves in a job. For us it is a passion. We love what we do knowing that we are providing a food source that has been humanely produced without the use of chemicals or hormones. I don’t think they understand how hard the work is to produce a quality animal. All these big businesses are the same, they want easy money while someone else is doing all the hard work. We are happy to supply excellent quality meat at a reasonable price. I would rather take a lower price and make our produce more widely available than to exclusive to a few. We are not the only farmers out there that think this way. All we want to do is remain sustainable and maintain our lifestyle not to make a million dollars.

I was planning a trip to Farmer Dan's farm to check out his workings for myself but, as luck would have it, another blogger has done the job for me! The writer of Cows In Clover chose Dan for her first farm to check out in her search of happy and healthy meat (also her pen-name), and has constructed a detailed review of the workings of the farm. Perfect! And, judging by the Farmers Market site, Dan is using his connections with like-minded local farmers to expand his delivery service's offerings. Cows In Clover suggests that offal will soon be readily available - Dan already threw in a lamb kidney in my delivery, so I'm looking forward to using that in an up-coming culinary experiment... Hopefully I'll have a chance tomorrow to play around with a couple of ideas I've been theorising, regarding two certain old favourites that still make me drool when I'm at a party... Hint hint!