Lamb boulangere 2

I see that my technique for cooking lamb boulangère has not changed very much since I last wrote about it, seven years ago. The chief difference is that yesterday I covered the roasting tin with foil, having learned that the lowest temperature of my oven – 130C-plus – is higher than the temperature inside a covered receptacle.

I smeared a little oil over a whole shoulder of lamb, seasoned it, and laid it on a bed of two sliced onions, the unpeeled cloves from a head of garlic, and two sprigs of rosemary. I covered the roasting tin with foil, and put it into the centre of a gas mark 1/140C oven, at 8am. (It’s a good idea to check on progress after the first hour, and regularly thereafter, adjusting the heat if necessary. I can never be confident about how my oven will behave.)

At 11am, I scraped and sliced new potatoes, dropping them into a pan of cold water. I brought the pan to the boil, and allowed it to boil vigorously for one minute before draining. (The idea is to get rid of some of the surface starch – potatoes cooked around meat are particularly liable to stick, because of the caramelised juices.)

By this time, there was a good amount of sauce surrounding the lamb. I removed the meat to a board, discarded the onions, squeezed the garlic out of its skins into the sauce, tipped in the potatoes and stirred them, and put back the meat on top.

I returned the tin, covered again, to the oven, turning up the dial to gas mark 4/180C. (I checked after half an hour, and discovered that this setting was high enough but not too fierce. The extra ingredients appeared to have moderated the temperature.)

At 1.30pm, I removed the joint to a large plate, covering it with the foil. I returned the potatoes to the top of the oven, now at its highest setting, to brown – about 20 minutes. (Be careful that they do not stick and burn.)

The meat fell away from the bone. I cut it up in the kitchen, and poured the small amount of sauce that the potatoes had not absorbed on top.

Lamb with yoghurt, cardamom, and ginger

This is a recipe from Madhur Jaffrey's Curry Easy. I've given her version, with my comments in italics; my version included three pieces of neck of lamb rather than lamb shanks, with the other quantities scaled down accordingly.

In spite of my reservations about the recipe as it stands, I'd like to give it another go. The sauce has an appealing zing and fragrance, thanks to the large quantities of ginger, cardamom, and coriander.

4 medium lamb shanks
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
350ml Greek or other thick yoghurt
6 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
7.5cm piece fresh ginger, peeled and chopped
3tbsp ground coriander
2tsp ground cumin
1/2tsp cayenne pepper
4tbsp olive or rapeseed oil
10 cardomom pods
1/2tsp black peppercorns
2 x 7.5cm cinnamon sticks
1/2tsp cloves
1 medium onion, peeled and sliced into fine half-rings

Pat the lamb shanks dry with kitchen paper. Sprinkle all over with 1/2tsp salt and lots of freshly ground black pepper. I seasoned my lamb with a little salt only; ground pepper, stewed, can become bitter.

Preheat the oven to 160C/gas mark 3. I baked my curry at this setting for 30 minutes, by which time it was simmering. At that point, I turned down the oven to gas mark S/130C.

Put 120ml of the yoghurt, the garlic and ginger into a blender, and blend until smooth. Add the coriander, cumin, cayenne pepper, one and a half tsp of salt, and the rest of the yoghurt. Blend to mix. I used whole coriander and cumin, lightly toasted in a dry saucepan and ground with a pestle and mortar.

Put the oil [this is a lot, given the fattiness of the meat; I used only a tbsp, of sunflower oil] in a casserole large enough to hold the meat, and place over a medium heat. When hot, put in the cardamom, peppercorns, cinnamon, cloves, and the shanks, and brown them on one side. Turn them over, dropping the onion slices in the spaces between them. Brown both meat and onions, moving them around the pan as you need to.

This is a tricky way to brown the meat and onion. You are likely to find, no matter how carefully you stir, that bits of onion and spice catch on the casserole and burn. I'd be inclined to coat the meat with a little oil and brown it on a grill pan, quickly, while frying the onions and spices separately in the casserole. Or, if the liquid is not going to cover the meat, to allow the browning process to take place inside the covered casserole.

Add the paste from the blender and 250ml water. I'd prefer to use stock, or even, dare I say it, a diluted, halved stock cube. Bring to a simmer. Cover the casserole, and place it in the oven for three hours, turning the shanks every 30 minutes.

The yoghurt split, of course. One way of trying to prevent the separation - but not one I can guarantee, having not tried it for a while - is to add a dstp of flour (gram or cornflour, preferably) to the yoghurt mix. Another is to add the garlic, ginger and spices to the casserole with the water or stock, while holding back the yoghurt to the end. Take the cooked dish out of the oven, let the simmering subside, add a little sauce to the yoghurt, then add some more, and then pour this yoghurt and sauce mixture into the casserole. If you want to warm the dish again, make sure you do not allow the sauce to bubble.

Carbonnade Nimoise

My final Elizabeth David recipe (which I forgot to photograph) from our holiday was a stew, though not one cooked in beer as the name may suggest. It originates from Nimes, home also of brandade of salt cod (as featured here last week), and involves, in David's book, lamb or mutton from the leg. I used chops from the middle neck. The garlic and rosemary are also my adaptations. You must use new, waxy, potatoes, which can hold up even after stewing for three hours, at the end of which they are deliciously imbued with fat and meat juice. For 4.

4 middle neck lamb chops
1 packet lardons or pancetta; or better, 100g of pancetta chopped into cubes
1 head garlic, separated into cloves
Potatoes for 4, peeled (or scraped) and cut into cubes
2 sprigs rosemary
2tbsp olive oil
Salt, pepper if you like (I usually add pepper on my plate)

This is a wonderfully simple dish. You toss everything in the oil, lay it out in a layer in a large baking dish, and brown the meat by starting it off at gas mark 8/230C for 20 minutes. Then you cover the dish with foil (or with a lid if it has one), and continue to cook at the lowest possible heat (my oven will simmer a stew at its lowest setting, gas mark S) for about three hours. That's it.

You might include other vegetables. My advice is to avoid carrots, which go dull if cooked for too long.

Lamb leg steaks

These are steaks, which you would fry or grill, but from the leg, which you would roast. So how to cook them? I chose a compromise.

The marinade includes a garlic clove, crushed with salt; the juice of half a lemon; and about three tbsps of olive oil. The steaks sat in it for only half an hour.

I got a ridged grill pan very hot, scraped excess marinade off the steaks, and seared them (one at a time) for only a minute each side, just long enough to give them a griddled appearance. I returned them to the marinade in the oven dish, and roasted them for 30 minutes at gas mark 6/200C. Those who prefer their lamb to be less well done could allow at least 10 minutes fewer.

As you can see, they produced a fair amount of sauce.

Lamb stew with aubergines and turnips

Ideally, one should add vegetables to a stew to give them just enough time in which to cook. Incorporating them at the start is a bad idea, because they will be overcooked before the meat is ready. But you cannot be confident of the optimum timing with the aubergines and turnips in this dish. One hour worked for me; but I needed to fiddle around with temperature settings, and to give the stew regular stirs, to ensure that the pot continued simmering and that the vegetables softened evenly.

(I know that carrots are a standard ingredient of many stews, but I don't like using them in this way. Overcooked, as they usually are, they lose all flavour. The exceptions are baby carrots cooked whole in a dish such as poule au pot or bollito misto.)

For 4

750g stewing lamb (I used pieces of middle neck)
Sunflower oil
Salt
2 red onions, roughly chopped
1 head garlic, separated into unpeeled cloves
1 bay leaf
200ml chicken stock
1 large aubergine, cubed
4 small turnips, peeled and sliced, or cut into chunks if you prefer

Coat the lamb in a little sunflower oil, salt it, and brown it quickly on a ridged grill pan (or in a heavy frying pan) over a high heat. Remove to a plate.

Put 2tbsps sunflower oil over a low to medium heat, and soften the onion for 10 minutes or so. Throw in the garlic cloves and bay leaf, and pour in the stock. Put the lamb pieces into the stew. You'll find that the liquid comes about half way up the meat; but after the pot has been in the oven for an hour or so, the meat will probably be submerged. Add more salt, if you like.

I put this dish into the oven for three and a half hours at gas mark S/130C. That setting will cause a stew in my Le Creuset pot to simmer gently. But your oven, and pot, may behave differently.

Stir in the aubergine and turnips with about an hour to go, and bring the stew to a simmering point before returning it to the oven. Turn up the dial temporarily to gas mark 6/200C, until the stew is simmering again - you may be surprised to find, if you have a heavy pot, that even at this setting the stew make take 20 minutes or longer to return to simmering point. Return to gas mark S. Check the ingredients at intervals, stirring them.

I served the stew, with its generous quantity of sauce, in bowls with couscous. So I might have spiced it (along the lines of this version), had there not been objectors to spicy food at the table. For myself, I mixed some of the sauce with harissa.

Lamb chops with garlic and lemon, and roast potatoes

The lamb chops we ate this weekend were the most delicious I have tasted in a while, with a gamey depth of flavour that they do not have in the spring.

My favourite method is to marinate them, brown them for a minute or less on each side on a pre-heated grill pan on a high flame, and roast them for 10 to 15 minutes. The oven heats them through without charring their surfaces; and it offers the second advantage of enabling you to cook the chops in their marinade.

I used new potatoes, peeled, sliced about the thickness of pound coins, put into cold water, rinsed, and patted dry. I have discovered that salting them as you toss them in oil in the roasting tin helps them to crisp (because the salt sucks the moisture out of them) and therefore causes them to be less sticky. Even so, I line the roasting tin with foil.

Prepare the potatoes as above, and toss them thoroughly in a roasting tin in a good glug or two of oil (I used sunflower) and enough salt to be distributed among them all. Roast them for 60 minutes at gas mark 6/200C, turning them half way through. If you have an efficient non-stick surface, turning them will be straightforward, though fiddly; if, like me, you do not, you may need gently to prise them loose.

For three chops, I crushed a clove of garlic with a little salt, and stirred in the juice of half a lemon and a tbsp of olive oil. I poured this marinade over the chops, turned them in it a few times, and left them, covered, for a couple of hours. I heated the grill pan for five minutes, browned them quickly (with the marinade scraped off) as outlined above, and put them into the roasting tin with the potatoes, pouring the marinade over the top.

Lamb and aubergine stew

The latest in Grub Street's hardback reissues of Elizabeth David's works - as long as you don't mind weights in pounds and ounces, they are lovely editions to have - is Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen. The following is based on one of David's recipes. Of course, to insist that cumin isn't English is a bit like claiming that tomatoes aren't Italian.

Serves 4

750g stewing lamb (I used pieces of middle neck)
Sunflower oil
Salt
2 medium aubergines, cut into largish cubes
2 onions, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
2tsp cumin, toasted gently in a small saucepan, then crushed in a mortar
2 lemon husks (optional)
1/2 stock cube (optional)
2tbsp olive oil

Coat the lamb in a little sunflower oil, salt it, and brown it quickly on a ridged grill pan over a high heat. Remove to a plate.

Put the aubergines, onions, garlic, cumin, and lemon and stock cube if wanted, in a heavy casserole. (I had used the juice of the lemon to make some hummus at lunchtime; and I think that stock cubes, though often frowned upon, add savouriness to dishes.) Toss everything in the olive oil.

The onions and aubergines will stew, and don't need frying first, unless you think that this dish will benefit from the flavour of browned onions.

Tip in the lamb and any juice it has exuded. If you have used half a stock cube, be careful how much extra salt you add.

Cover, and put in the oven at gas mark 4/180C. If you have a heavy pan, the stew may take a good 45 minutes to get simmering. Once there is activity, you can turn down the heat - perhaps to as low as gas mark S/130C. You may want to give the stew another 90 minutes from that point. Stir it from time to time.

Grilled (and baked) lamb cutlets

It's certainly not worth firing up the barbecue for just a few lamb cutlets. So how otherwise to get that summery, grilled flavour? A ridged grill pan over a high heat will do it - the risk being that you will burn the surfaces of the meat before cooking the interiors. A mix of grill pan and the oven is the answer.

Crush a couple of garlic cloves to a paste with a little salt, and smear the paste on the meat. Turn the meat in a tbsp or two of olive oil, and squirt over the juice of half a lemon. Leave to marinate for an hour or more.

Put a grill pan over a high heat for at least five minutes. Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 8/230C. Scrape the marinade off the cutlets, and grill for about a minute each side - that should be enough to get them well browned. Transfer to an oven dish, pour over the marinade, throw in the lemon husk if you like, and put into the oven for five to 10 minutes, according to taste.

Pot-roasted lamb shoulder

I took on board Elwyn's comment (below my oxtail stew entry) when I pot-roasted a whole shoulder of lamb for our fireworks party. (Rain washed out the fireworks, so we simply ate and drank). I browned the onions in oil in my casserole dish first, but after that followed the principle behind the oxtail stew, throwing the rest of the ingredients into the pot: lamb, 2 bay leaves, sprig of rosemary, 1 head of garlic separated into cloves, salt. I had only about 50mls of chicken stock, which I poured in along with half a chicken stock cube. You may frown - but I think the cube added richness to the sauce, of which there was plenty for eight people.

You're supposed to cook meat gently. But shoulder of lamb is very forgiving. Because I was using my heaviest pot, I started cooking the dish at gas mark 6/200C, turning it down after an hour and half - and turning over the meat - once it was bubbling. The lamb, like the oxtail, browned inside the pot.

After another 45 minutes, I put the pot on the bottom of the oven, turned up the dial to 6 again, and roasted some potatoes on the top shelf.

At the end of all that, I was able to carve the meat with a spoon and fork. I strained the sauce (squeezing the garlic into it), and returned meat and sauce to the pot, to serve as a kind of stew. It was meltingly tender.

Lamb stew with aubergines and chick peas

2 lamb shanks
1tbsp sunflower oil
1tsp cumin seeds
1 orange, cut into quarters
1 ladleful chicken stock
1tsp turmeric
6 unpeeled garlic cloves
Salt
1 large aubergine, cubed
1 tin chickpeas, drained

Heat the oil in a heavy casserole, and brown the shanks. You want the oil to be hot enough to brown the meat quickly, but not so hot that it burns. Once the browning has started, you should be able to turn the flame quite low.

Throw in the cumin, and let it fry for a minute or so. Then throw in the orange, and pour in the stock; add the turmeric, garlic, and salt to taste.

Put the casserole, covered, into a low oven. My Le Creuset, pictured above, will reach a very gentle simmer at gas mark S/130C, though I sometimes start at a higher heat, to get it going. Other pans, and ovens, may behave differently.

After two and a half hours, stir in the aubergine. After a further 45 minutes, stir in the chick peas. Cook for another 20 minutes or so.

At this point, I removed the meat from the bones and stirred it into the stew, which served 3, generously.

Pot-roasted lamb shoulder

I once believed that the way to preserve tenderness in meat was not, as many people believed, to surround it in water or steam, but to roast it at a low temperature. I have since discovered that the temperature of my oven, at its lowest setting, is higher than the temperature inside a heavy casserole placed in the oven. This lamb fell off the bone. Serves 4.

1 half-shoulder of lamb
1tbsp sunflower oil
2tbsp white wine (or red wine) vinegar
1 head of garlic, separated into cloves
1 large onion, cut into chunks
1 large carrot, peeled and cut into chunks
1 sprig rosemary
2 bay leaves

In a heavy casserole, warm the oil over a medium heat. Put in the lamb, salted, browning it on all the sides it will rest on. The pan will get very hot; the trick is to turn down the heat if the oil threatens to burn, while still getting the meat to brown.

Pour in the vinegar, which may splutter and evaporate almost immediately. Tip in the garlic, onion, carrot, and herbs. Cover, and place in a gas mark S/130C oven, for three and a half to four hours.

Check on the progress from time to time. You want a very gentle simmer, and you may find that this low heat does not achieve it, at least at first. My smaller Le Creuset pan will respond to gas mark S; my larger one takes ages to warm up, and may require a gas mark 2/150C setting to achieve the same effect. You have to learn how your oven and equipment behave through trial and error.

Remove the lamb from the casserole on to a chopping board. Tip the vegetables and sauce, of which there may be a fair amount, through a sieve into a saucepan. Return the lamb to the casserole, cover it again, and return it to the oven. Squeeze the garlic from the husks into the sauce; discard the other vegetables. Simmer the sauce until you have a consistency and concentration of flavour you like. Check the seasoning.

One-pan lamb chops

Allegra McEvedy has offered some very attractive recipes in the Guardian recently. I think I shall give this one a miss, however. Perhaps it's unfair not to have a go; but there are several details that make me think it would give me trouble.

You fry spiced lamb chops, then onion rings, then slices of butternut squash. You layer them in the frying pan with broccoli, pour stock over it all, and bake for 10 minutes.

First, I would not use a cast iron pan of the type illustrated in the newspaper. Any seasoning that the pan has had - the accretion of a slick layer thanks to cooking fat - will be compromised by the deglazing effect of the stock.

Allegra McEvedy can peel and slice a squash in four minutes, while her onion rings are frying. That is beyond my competence. My biggest reservation, though, concerns the cooking time. Squash is often tough. You cannot rely on it to tenderise after a brief frying and a 10 minute immersion in stock, as it receives here - even assuming that the stock is sufficient to immerse it. The broccoli might be a problem, too. If it does not touch the liquid, it might remain crunchy; if it is immersed, it will overcook.

What do you do with all the liquid at the end? Use some as sauce, and the rest later as stock, I suppose.

Lamb shoulder, potatoes boulangeres

One of the principal ways in which the experience of the home cook differs from the one promised in recipes is that we constantly have to check and adjust our oven temperatures. Even when we're confident about our ovens and utensils, we cannot be sure that a dish put in an oven at gas mark 4/180C for an hour, say, will behave as it is supposed to. This is what I found when I cooked a shoulder of lamb yesterday.

I had studded the joint with garlic and rosemary, anointed it with oil, seasoned it, and left it overnight in a roasting tin in the fridge, with a foil covering. At 8.30 in the morning, I placed it in a gas mark S/130C oven, still with its foil - the theory being that the foil would keep the temperature of the tin below the oven temperature, and so help to cook the meat gently. After a few hours, all was going well.

I peeled and sliced potatoes, and put them into cold water, giving them a good rinse. I then changed the water. I did this because I had decided not to parboil the potatoes, and because I wanted to get rid of as much of their surface starch as possible. Surface starch can cause them to stick, and also forms a tough, rather than crunchy, crust.

At 11.30am I removed the roasting tin from the oven, lifted the joint on to a board, and tipped in the drained potatoes, mixing them with a ladleful of chicken stock and some splashes of olive oil. I seasoned them with salt. I put the joint back on top, covered the tin again, and returned it to the oven. I turned up the temperature to gas mark 3/160C. I wanted the potatoes to steam, before I uncovered the dish and browned them.

After 45 minutes, there was very little activity inside the foil. Eventually, to get things going, I turned the dial right up to 7/220C. I took out the joint at 1.05pm, lifted the tin to a higher shelf, and gave the potatoes 20 minutes to brown, uncovered, while the meat rested.

I have noticed before that a roasting tin, particularly a crowded one, does not heat up very efficiently when covered. Still, the lamb, being a forgiving cut, showed no ill effects from the blasting heat.

Lamb, bean and leek stew

A variation on this stew. It is quite rich: you do not need as much meat (for 4) as I recommended in the earlier version.

650g lamb neck fillet, cut into medallions
2 onions, chopped
I large leek, sliced and soaked (to wash away the grit)
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 cloves garlic, unpeeled
1 sprig rosemary
2 bay leaves
1 ladleful stock (I used chicken)
Salt
2 tins cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
3tbsp double cream
Sunflower oil
Olive oil

In a heavy casserole, warm a couple of tbsps of olive oil over a gentle heat, and sweat the onions and garlic in it, adding more oil if the vegetables threaten to catch. When they are softened, throw in the (drained) leeks, and stir to coat them in oil. (Soup and stew recipes always tell you to do that: whether the coating in fat makes any difference to the ultimate flavour must be open to question.)

I have written before that I like to brown meat on a ridged grill pan. I now coat it first with a little oil, which I think promotes browning. Toss the medallions of lamb with just a tsp or two of sunflower or groundnut oil (which have higher smoking points than olive oil). Place the pan on a medium to high heat, give it a couple of minutes to get hot, and brown the meat in batches; the process should take no more than a minute on each side. (If it takes longer, the lamb may dry out. Transfer the lamb as it browns to a plate.)

Tip the lamb into the casserole with the vegetables, and add the whole garlic, rosemary, bay, stock, and salt to taste. Transfer to an oven at gas mark 2/150C.

Check every so often to see that the stew is gently simmering; adjust the temperature accordingly. Because not much was happening to my stew after 30 minutes or so, I raised the dial to gas mark 4/180C for 20 minutes, before turning it back down to 1/140C. That low temperature was quite sufficient to maintain a simmer.

After 90 minutes, tip in the cannellini beans. Return the casserole to the oven for a further 30 minutes, before transferring it to a low light on the hob. You can squeeze the whole garlic cloves from their husks into the sauce if you like. Stir in the cream, warm through for a minute, and serve.

Summer lamb stew

The butcher has good cuts of stewing lamb at the moment, offputting only if you imagine a thick winter stew with flour and rich stock. This one has a light sauce, made by the meat and vegetables. For 4.

800g lamb neck fillet
1tbsp white wine vinegar
8 cloves garlic
3 onions, peeled and cut into large chunks
1 sprig rosemary
2 bay leaves
2tbsp olive oil
Salt
2 tins cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

Cut the lamb into rounds. On a medium to high heat, brown the pieces on a ridged grill pan, in batches. Transfer them to a heavy casserole. Pour the vinegar on to the pan, allow it to bubble until reduced to about 1 dstsp, and pour it and the pan scrapings on to the meat. (If your pan is very hot, you'll find that the vinegar evaporates to nothing almost immediately.)

Throw in the garlic, onion and herbs, and stir in the oil. Season to taste. Put the casserole into a gas mark 2/150C oven for an hour. If the contents of the pan are bubbling, you can turn the oven down to gas mark S/130C. Cook for a further two hours. Half an hour before the end, stir in the beans.

A stew with lamb shanks

Saturday was the nicest day of the year so far. Something grilled, with new potatoes, seemed appropriate; but, when I got to the butcher, I found the lamb shanks the most tempting items on display. My greengrocer is not selling any Jersey Royals yet -- still too expensive, he says. So we had a wintry lamb stew, with mash.

The shanks were large. I bought two for three people, and I cooked them roughly as in this recipe, but with a couple of modifications. First, I used a little sunflower oil rather than olive oil for the initial browning -- it has a higher smoke point, and is therefore less likely to degrade and tarnish the stew. Second, I deglazed the pan with white wine vinegar: about 80ml, which I allowed to bubble until it had almost disappeared. Then I added the stock -- bought beef stock, from the butcher -- before putting the casserole in the oven.

At the end of cooking, I removed the shanks, and sieved and reduced the sauce, as in the previous recipe. But this time I stripped the meat from the shank bones, and returned it to the sauce (of which there was now about 250ml) to warm through. This stew, with its combination of tender, gelatinous meat and garlicky sauce, was quite the most wonderful I have eaten for a long time -- despite the season.

Lamb with lemon and garlic

Not all the recipes in Delia Smith's How To Cheat at Cooking involve cans, frozen things, or other pre-prepared foods. There is a wonderfully simple one for Greek lamb baked with lemon and garlic. My adaptation is even simpler, because I did not have any flat-leaf parsley, which Delia suggests scattering over the dish at the end in a mixture with lemon zest and garlic -- gremolata.

I was grateful for the illustration in the book. Delia tells you to wrap the ingredients in foil, to which food can stick; the photograph shows kitchen paper inside the foil.

For two.

1 lamb neck fillet, weighing about 350g
Zest of 1 lemon, juice of half
1 clove garlic, sliced
Salt, pepper

Cut the fillet crosswise into medallions -- 2.5cm thick, Delia says. Make cuts in the flesh with a sharp knife, and insert the slivers of garlic. Give each medallion several slivers if that is necessary to use up the clove.

Lay a sheet of foil in and up the sides of a roasting tin. Lay a sheet of kitchen paper on top, and the meat on top of that. Squirt over the lemon juice, and distribute the zest. Grind over salt and pepper. Fold up the foil and paper to make a parcel, and bake the dish at gas mark 1/140C for three hours. It is delicious.

Foil and slow-roasting

I have mentioned here before the flaw in the theory that covering meat -- with foil or with a lid -- keeps it moist during cooking. It is not the atmosphere that is important, but the temperature and the cooking medium. A build-up of steam will cook meat very efficiently, and dry it out.

The flaw in that theory, I have realised, is that my oven gets pretty hot, even on the lowest setting. The likes of Heston Blumenthal have ovens that they can keep at 70C; mine -- a not inexpensive model -- gets as high as 130C, even on gas mark S. A foil covering for slow cooking is protective. (Here is a slow-cooked belly pork.)

Last weekend, I browned a half-shoulder of lamb. The time was 1.15 p.m. I put the joint into a roasting tin with a little oil, a scattering of rosemary and chopped garlic, and seasoning; I covered the tin with foil, and put it on to the bottom of the oven, at gas mark S.

I turned and basted the meat occasionally. At 5.30 p.m., I parboiled some sliced potatoes, drained them, and tipped them into the tin with the meat, turning them in the fat and the -- surprisingly meagre -- juice. At 6.45 p.m., I took the meat out of the oven, transferring it to a hot plate and leaving it in the warm grill section. I turned up the oven to gas mark 6/200 C and put the tin of potatoes on the top shelf to brown.

That took half an hour, after which the meat was rested and deliciously tender. We ate it with the potatoes and some leeks.

Stewed neck of lamb

You can begin a stew of the saute type (one in which the meat is browned first) in a variety of ways. Do you fry the onions and any other vegetables first, then add the meat? Do you fry the onions, remove them from the pan, and add the meat? Do you brown the meat first, and add the onions? Do you brown the meat in a separate pan?

The only one of these options I do not like is the first -- although many recipes pretend that it is feasible. You need a high heat to get meat brown. On a low heat, it simply stews and goes grey in the liquid it disgorges. But if you turn up the heat when onions are in the pan, some of them will catch on the bottom and char.

All the other options will work. The easiest is the last. When I made a lamb stew the other day, I used a griddle pan for the browning.

I had neck fillet (about 650 g, for four), which I sliced into medallions. I coated them in flour. I put the griddle on to a medium to high heat for five minutes, distributed a little groundnut oil over the surface, and gave the medallions (in three batches) about a minute on each side to brown. I added them to my casserole, in which I had softened two chopped onions and two cloves of garlic. I completed the stew with chicken stock to cover, a bay leaf, a splash of soy sauce, a star anise, and salt.

The process was just like that for the oxtail stew, but with the shorter cooking time of two hours at gas mark 1/140 C. I removed the meat, strained the sauce, put the meat back into the casserole and covered it, and boiled the sauce until it was rich and thickened. I recombined meat and sauce. Then I added a bottle of strained, rinsed alubia beans. (Alubia beans are a kind of kidney bean. Bottled beans and chickpeas are a better bet than canned ones, lacking the hint of a metallic taste that can spoil the latter.) I put the stew back into the oven to warm through.

It was not quite as simple as that. You can never be sure how long it will take to warm up a heavy, Le Creuset casserole. In this case, half an hour in a low oven was not enough; so I finished the process above a gentle flame on the hob.

Barbecued shoulder of lamb

My barbecue enthusiasm continues. I am almost a convert.

With guests staying, and with the weather encouraging us to dine outdoors, I decided that a barbecued joint would be both a treat and simple to prepare. Our local butcher created a work of art: a boned shoulder of lamb, rolled into a torpedo shape and tied. I shoved slivers of garlic and sprigs of rosemary into the folds, rubbed the meat with sunflower oil, and salted it.

I heated a good mound of charcoal, adding to it continually for about an hour and a half. The barbecue allows you to insert the rack at different heights: I started on the middle setting, but found that the heat was intense enough to allow me to raise it.

A shoulder of lamb is fatty. The fat drops on to the coals, igniting small fires. You have to manipulate the joint constantly at first, to prevent charring.

I cooked the lamb for 40 minutes, turning it regularly. Sliced, it was still slightly pink in the centre: perfect, in other words.

We ate it with gratin dauphinois and green beans.