Cooking with lamb - Arousing flavors and Memories

Well, I bought a semi-boneless leg of lamb at Safeway on a $5 Friday and finally got around to cooking it. I cut off a pound of meat for a different meal and roasted it. I mostly followed this recipe: Roast Lamb with Pomegranate sauce.

Differences are I used a cup of lamb stock instead of the chicken stock specified and I used about half ounce to an once of grenadine in place of the sugar. Also, for the thickener, I used beurre manie (butter with flour worked into it.) The sauce was pretty tasty.

To accompany the lamb, peas and lentils. We quite like, Ina Garten's Warm French Lentils. It is tasty and countless times, we have used substitutes and it is always good. Changes this time: shallot instead of leek, 1/2 white carrot and a stalk of celery instead of the 2 carrots, 1/2 onion with 4 cloves stuck in and no turnip. These lentils are good leftover too.

Of course, we had leftover roast lamb. We had that on buns with bbq sauce we had frozen made by B a couple of months ago. It was delicious too. We had beet greens and a salad with beets and feta.

For the pound of meat that I cut off, I made a lamb biriyani using a recipe from Curried Favors. It was time consuming, but delicious. It is not as good as Iqbal (pharmacist in Dhahran from Pakistan and wonderful cook), but it was better than some restaurant versions we've had. Oh blasphemy, I had no time to make raita (9pm dinner). However, I made raita for the leftover version. Should also make some dal, but I am too lazy.

Just an aside, whenever I think of lamb and pomegranate sauce, I think of a lady I loaned my steamer pot to when we were in Dhahran years ago. She was, I think, from an Eastern European country. I did not know her well, but she just had a gleam in her eye when she talked about this lamb dish which is why I offered to let her use my steamer.... I should have asked for the recipe....

Oh, B asked for apple tart using Jonathan apples because of his Grandma. Luckily, I found them at the farmer's market.

Please excuse this post if it has errors, but I wanted to share these not so good pictures!