Here it is, our first taste of our own roast mutton, in all it’s glory. Well worth waiting for.
Choose a good joint, not too fatty, but a bit of marbling is good. Both leg and shoulder joints will benefit from slow roasting, you can do them both with this method. Weigh the joint first, you need to cook it for about 40 minutes per 450g at 150C. This monster took 4 hours.
Pop the joint in a roasting pan (ideally a lidded one, but foil will do if you don’t have a pan with a lid). Add a sprig of rosemary, and if you like, make a few slits in the meat and stuff with a couple of cloves of garlic. Pour about 250ml of red wine over the meat (I didn’t have any so used dark ale), cover, and roast for the required time.
Bring it out and left it rest for about half an hour before carving. The juices make amazing gravy, I put the roasting pan on the hob, added some gravy granules and brought to the boil until it thickened. There was a bit of clear fat resting on the top of the gravy but I poured most of it away and mixed the rest in. The alcohol gives the gravy a really nice flavour.
My dad declared it ‘very nice’, my mum and I decided we preferred it over lamb, and my husband, who when we met only ate chicken and sausages, had thirds.
This is what was left, and I am taking a break from turning it into a meat and potato pie to write this!
Ramblings of a Scatterbrained Lass 