Cooking and Food Stuff
My mother decided that, for Lent, she'd give up eating meat and cakes. Since we eat together often enough, this has meant that, effectively, both my father and I have to give up meat in the main meal. This has meant that trying to cook has grown more challenging, and we all get to see what life would be like if we gave up meat. Except for the Sunday main meal, which I convinced mum to keep, we've been generally avoiding meat, although we have eaten some fish.
At first it went pretty well, although it was hard to keep coming up with vegetarian and fish based recipes that everyone could eat. I don't have that many decent vegetarian recipes that I can cycle through, although my mum does a mean vegetable/minestrone soup. By the third week, though, the whole Lent diet had broken down and mum cooked hamburgers and then later we feasted on take away curry. I think we all felt better not eating so much meat, but once a week wasn't enough. I think two would be the minimum we could sustainably cope with over the long term, and we might want to start by ramping it down to three, but going straight to one was over-optimistic.
For some reason, the lengthening days and lack of meat triggered a desire to try to cook a meaty dish that was also a bit sweet. Specifically, I remembered a dish that my dad had made for a special occasion, which tasted very nice and was a special treat, but rarely got made because it required fresh apricots and a lot of preparation. I had cooked it twice in Oxford for my friends, and I think that going back to Oxford also reminded me of that. It's called Lamb a la Greque, which is a stew of lamb with apricots and tomatoes.
I had the brainwave that the first part of the recipe, which calls for poaching the apricots in sugary water is much like making a syrup, and tinned apricots in syrup could be substituted. The other very intensive part of the work involves preparing a lamb shoulder by hacking away the lamb before frying it off. I decided instead to try our usual roast lamb shoulder for our Sunday Roast, but to use the sauce from the recipe and to roast the whole shoulder in that sauce. It was very exciting because I didn't know how it would turn out.
The result was a bit mixed. It definitely wasn't the awesome dish my dad had first cooked (and which I'd gotten right once) but it was still not bad. The sauce was good, but the meat didn't take up as much of the flavour as I would have liked. As a result, it was more like a roast dipped in sauce. The roast itself was very soft and tender because of the sauce, and it was easy to separate it from the bone and serve it up. The sauce was a lot sharper, either because the meat hadn't cooked into it or the syrup from the tin was sweeter than making it myself. Also, the apricots dissolved into the sauce rather than stayed whole.
As a random story, the first time I cooked it in Oxford, for six people, I walked into the local butchers in Summertown and I asked for lamb shoulder. I had no idea what lamb shoulder looked like, or why it was special, but my parents had insisted that I use that cut, and I couldn't find it in the supermarket. So after I asked for it and they prepared it for me, the butcher told me that the lamb shoulder would cost me twenty pounds. The shock must have been written on my face as they insisted it was good quality stuff. I still had to go out and get more money from a cash machine, although I think my youth meant that they didn't mind that, since it was clear that they could have sold me beef and I wouldn't have known the difference. I was half convinced they were ripping me off. Still, I bought it, and I cooked it, and it was very, very nice. I tried the same again with £7 diced lamb from the supermarket, and it wasn't the same.
At first it went pretty well, although it was hard to keep coming up with vegetarian and fish based recipes that everyone could eat. I don't have that many decent vegetarian recipes that I can cycle through, although my mum does a mean vegetable/minestrone soup. By the third week, though, the whole Lent diet had broken down and mum cooked hamburgers and then later we feasted on take away curry. I think we all felt better not eating so much meat, but once a week wasn't enough. I think two would be the minimum we could sustainably cope with over the long term, and we might want to start by ramping it down to three, but going straight to one was over-optimistic.
For some reason, the lengthening days and lack of meat triggered a desire to try to cook a meaty dish that was also a bit sweet. Specifically, I remembered a dish that my dad had made for a special occasion, which tasted very nice and was a special treat, but rarely got made because it required fresh apricots and a lot of preparation. I had cooked it twice in Oxford for my friends, and I think that going back to Oxford also reminded me of that. It's called Lamb a la Greque, which is a stew of lamb with apricots and tomatoes.
I had the brainwave that the first part of the recipe, which calls for poaching the apricots in sugary water is much like making a syrup, and tinned apricots in syrup could be substituted. The other very intensive part of the work involves preparing a lamb shoulder by hacking away the lamb before frying it off. I decided instead to try our usual roast lamb shoulder for our Sunday Roast, but to use the sauce from the recipe and to roast the whole shoulder in that sauce. It was very exciting because I didn't know how it would turn out.
The result was a bit mixed. It definitely wasn't the awesome dish my dad had first cooked (and which I'd gotten right once) but it was still not bad. The sauce was good, but the meat didn't take up as much of the flavour as I would have liked. As a result, it was more like a roast dipped in sauce. The roast itself was very soft and tender because of the sauce, and it was easy to separate it from the bone and serve it up. The sauce was a lot sharper, either because the meat hadn't cooked into it or the syrup from the tin was sweeter than making it myself. Also, the apricots dissolved into the sauce rather than stayed whole.
As a random story, the first time I cooked it in Oxford, for six people, I walked into the local butchers in Summertown and I asked for lamb shoulder. I had no idea what lamb shoulder looked like, or why it was special, but my parents had insisted that I use that cut, and I couldn't find it in the supermarket. So after I asked for it and they prepared it for me, the butcher told me that the lamb shoulder would cost me twenty pounds. The shock must have been written on my face as they insisted it was good quality stuff. I still had to go out and get more money from a cash machine, although I think my youth meant that they didn't mind that, since it was clear that they could have sold me beef and I wouldn't have known the difference. I was half convinced they were ripping me off. Still, I bought it, and I cooked it, and it was very, very nice. I tried the same again with £7 diced lamb from the supermarket, and it wasn't the same.