I love a good Sunday roast as much as the next and I particularly love roast lamb. In my brain lamb is almost too decadent to buy when cooking just for 2, a leg will usually set you back €20 or more and in my opinion it doesn’t lend itself to having its leftovers transformed into another dinner or lunch. This week we treated ourselves to a shoulder which is more manageable for 2 but you could easily feed 4-6 out of.

So with the feeling of decadence in mind I wanted to do something really special with this lamb, but as I am a crazy person always thinking about the next meal I wanted something that would make a good lunch for work too. My little brain started working and I remembered this recipe I’d spotted on the Splendid Table for The Zahav Lamb Shoulder.

That recipe was somewhat involved for a lazy Sunday so I settled on a slow roast lamb shoulder with middle eastern spices, which I knew would be delicious and tender for dinner but would also make an amazing pitta with a tomato cucumber salad for lunch!

First make a rub for the lamb:

Ingredients:

• 2tbsp olive/rapeseed oil
• 1 heaped tbsp baharat seasoning (or use ras al hanout if you can’t find it)
• 1 tsp dried mint
• 1/2 tbsp sea salt
• 2 cloves garlic, finely minced
• 5cm ginger, finely minced

Poke the lamb shoulder all over with a knife and smear with the rub, cover and leave in the fridge for a couple of hours. If you don’t have a dish like the one pictured, use a regular roasting pan

Get ready to roast:

Preheat the oven to 160c

• Mix 1/4 cup pomegranate molasses with 3/4 cup water and pour over the lamb, if you can’t get your hands on pomegranate molasses, drizzle the lamb with a generous 2 tbsp honey and pour over a cup of water, but try to get pomegranate molasses it’s unbelievable stuff, sticky, sweet and sour
• Roast with the lid on (or covered in foil if using a roasting dish) for 3 hours, basting with the juices occasionally, at this point the lamb should be starting to fall off the bone
• Turn the oven up to 220c for another 20 mins to get the edges charred and crisp and delicious
• Let rest for 15 mins before serving with the juices from the pan *

Side dish suggestions:

Potatoes, simply cubed roasted at high temp with rapeseed oil, salt, pepper, rosemary and a few cloves of smashed garlic

Pea, feta and mint puree, this works really well to cut through the fatty sweetness of the lamb:

• In a pot sautee 1/2 onion and 1 clove garlic minced in some oil and butter until soft but not coloured, add half a pack of frozen peas (500g) and clamp the lid on until they defrost
• Blitz to a puree with 3 sprigs mint leaves, approx 80g feta, the juice of 1 lemon and salt and pepper to taste

Serve big slices of the lamb with the delicious pan juices and take your Sunday roast from the mundane to the exotic:

 

*There will be a lot of fat from the lamb with the juices in the pan – a good trick is to decant into a freezer safe jug and pop it in the freezer while your lamb is resting, the fat will solidify making it easy to scrape off. Then just microwave the juices to serve