Slow Roasted Greek Style Lamb

(Vampire’s Kill)

This recipe is featured on Cape Town Magazine blog.

 

what lurketh behind the Vampire’s Kill….scroll down to find out!

Our new house (well, it’s going on a year now, with the unrenovated bits going on 60 odd years old), hosted it’s first Govender-Ypma Halloween party on Sunday 31 October. We spent hours the night before setting up elaborate cob webs, dangling rubber skeletons, ratty black bin bag fringed curtains and literally every other prop we could find in the party stores- bloody daggers, bat and cat decals, a severed hand, squishy skulls with maggots oozing out (my personal favourite!), spiders and vampire teeth.

We even lugged 30kg of dry ice from the other side of the Boerewors curtain (a little Cape Town joke) for spooky effects and recorded all the cheesiest horror music we could find: think Ghostbusters, Addams family, witches’ cackles and scary heavy breathing. Some Wagner balanced it out a tad. Now a party without proper food, would be no fun at all. This was the Halloween themed adult menu I created

  • Death by Wobble Drinks (low cal jelly + appletizer/ low cal jelly + juice +vodka)

  • Witch’s Garden (Crudites +dip)

  • Fresh Flesh (a borrowed title, for smoked salmon trout with chive cream cheese on melba toasts)

  • Newts, Toads & Bugs (Vegetable Pilaf with Soya sausages)

  • Crushed Baby Bird Cupcakes (lemon cupcakes with lemon curd centres+ frosting)

  • Mud and Clot Cupcakes (Chocolate cupcakes with sour cherries + frosting)

  • Wizard’s Cauldron (Nigella’s Black Forest Trifle)

I will feature the Lamb here and the cupcakes and trifle in subsequent posts.
I adapted Tessa Kiros’s recipe, from her book Falling Cloudberries, which I absolutely adore for both the beautiful recipes passed down through the generations in her family and the rich family history she shares with the reader. When I made this roast lamb on Saturday night, I felt like I was sitting in Tessa’s Mother’s kitchen and helping her prepare it.


Ingredients

2kg leg lamb (I made an additional deboned 900g leg, along with this)
8 cloves of garlic, unpeeled>

2 tsp crushed ginger and garlic paste (mine had a touch of chilli in it)

2 lemons, juiced

large bunch oregano. chopped

40g butter cubed (Tessa attributes the lamb’s tenderness to the butter. I caved.)

60ml olive oil

1/2 cup water

salt to taste

Method
Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees Celsius and Spray n Cook (or butter) a roasting dish to fit leg of lamb (I transferred mine to a deep dish after roasting in a shallow one initially. Do yourself a favour and start with a deep dish).

Rub lamb with ginger and garlic and salt.

Make incisions into the flesh and tuck cloves of garlic in.

Carefully run your finger under the layer of fat (I trimmed most of this away) and tuck some oregano under and sprinkle liberally all over the top.

Add half lemon juice over the leg and dot with butter.

Pour oil over.

Add to roasting pan and brown for 10 minutes per side.

Remove from oven and lower heat to 150 degrees Celsius.

Cover lamb with heavy duty foil, make two small gashes in the foil and bake.

After the first hour, turn lamb over and add half the water and the lemon juice). There will already be juices released.

Turn lamb over each hour or so, adding remaining water. Cook until your preferred level of doneness is achieved.

Remove foil and cook for 30 minutes at 180 degrees to brown up a bit. (I did this on the Sunday).

* If you like, collect the pan juices, skim off the fat and thicken with a little flour to make a gorgeous gravy. Serve lamb with roasted potatoes and a green salad*

The meat will be tender. I served with various artisanal breads, as a take on Greek lamb in pita, along with a big bowl of hummus (Pus) and Tzatziki (Ghost and Goblin Pate). By that stage, the Halloween inspired names had run off with my mind.

 

 

can’t get rid of the scream guy..he’s at every Halloween party!

For Frightful Halloween Cupcakes, click here

 

 

 

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