Greek Roast Lamb

As promised, I’ve got a recipe for an actual entrée this time. It's a slightly modified take on one that I found on lambrecipes.org, with adjustments made for the fact that the farmers market didn't have as large a cut of meat as the recipe called for.  Now there's a problem you don't often run into at the grocery store. 

After choosing a recipe that looked manageable, I wrote down the ingredients I'd need and headed out to the Copley Square Farmers Market, this time remembering to bring my trendy- if somewhat overpriced considering what it is- re-usable grocery bag from Whole Foods. 

The first booth I visited was Siena Farms, based in Sudbury.  They had an impressive array of pretty much every fruit and vegetable currently in season in southern New England.  I picked out an onion and some garlic for the lamb, and lettuce and tomatoes for a salad, which was rounded out with some delicious grass-fed mozzarella cheese from Narragansett Creamery.  It turns out Narragansett exports something even better than cheap beer.

The meat itself came from Stillman’s at the Turkey Farm, where I’d shopped the previous week.  The same woman who cut my carton of eggs in half then said she didn’t have the four pound leg of lamb the recipe required, but recommended a leg steak and some kabobs, assuring me that it would be more than enough to serve two.

As I browsed the rest of the farmers market, I exchanged knowing smiles with several other people carrying trendy reusable grocery bags from Whole Foods, each of us basking in the knowledge that we were clearly much more serious about sustainable agriculture than the shoppers without them.

After I got home, the actual roasting of the dish itself, as well as adjusting the amounts of ingredients, involved a little bit of guesswork, which wasn’t helped by the fact that there was nothing on the package the lamb came in saying exactly how much it weighed.  I estimate between a pound and a half and two pounds.  Anyway, Tim and I agreed that the dish ended up delicious, though the meat could have been slightly less well done and the potatoes were a tad too crunchy.  Based on this thorough analysis, here’s the revised and revised again version of the recipe that I would use if I were to try it again.  If anyone does make it, let me know how it turns out.

Ingredients:

• 2 pounds pasture-raised lamb kabobs
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled, chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
• black pepper, to taste
• juice of 1 lemon (some bottled lemon-juice has corn)
• 2 tablespoons pastured butter, softened
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 1/2 cup water
• 9 small white potatoes
• 1 tablespoon olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 325.
2. Take the meat out of the packaging and place it in a roasting pan.
3. Sprinkle garlic, onion, and pepper over lamb.
4. Juice the lemon and combine the juice with butter.  Brush mixture over lamb to coat, then sprinkle diced onion evenly over ingredients in pan.
5. Add water and wine.  Cover with tin foil and back 45 minutes.
6. While the lamb is cooking, chop up potatoes and cook in boiling water for 5-10 minutes to soften.  Let them cool, then toss them in olive oil.
7. Remove pan from oven, add potatoes, re-cover, and continue baking at least another 20 minutes, until lamb is slightly pink in the center.