Asian Style Braised Lamb Shank

I had three lamb shanks sitting in the freezer like forever ! All the recipes I looked up were leaning towards the European style cooking with red wine or port. The lamb shanks I had were not exactly bursting in the meat department. In fact it had very little meat and I was not too keen to open a bottle of red just to cook some bones.

Trawling the net, I came upon these Asian flavoured lamb shanks. This was more my cup of tea. The flavours were really good and the meat literally fell off the bone.

Ingredients
3 lamb shanks

4 Tbsp soy sauce
150ml water
5 slices ginger
2 star anise
4 cloves garlic, smashed
1 Tbsp sugar

1 tsp white vinegar or 2 tsp rice vinegar

Method
1. Put all the ingredients except vinegar into the pressure cooker.

2. Pressure cook for 30 minutes or until the meat is tender.

3. With the lid off, boil to reduce and thicken the sauce. Turn the shanks over often. Add vinegar. Season with salt if required.

4. Remove the shanks from the sauce and grill/broil for 5-10 minutes to brown the meat. This process is optional.

5. Pour the sauce over the lamb shanks and serve with rice or noodles.

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Stuffed Leg of Lamb

The finished meal - Stuffed leg of lamb with peas and baked potatoes.

It was the Rednecks time to cook and the missus suggested that we have roast leg of lamb - suddenly I had a ‘Jamie Oliver Moment’. Why not de-bone and stuff the leg for a change? Sounded like a good idea at the time and as I had not made stuffing before, a quick browse through the New Zealanders cooking Bible ‘The Edmonds Cook Book’ was undertaken to confirm the ingredients required.

As we were out of breadcrumbs Mrs. Redneck quickly made a white loaf in the bread maker which, after cooling, was chopped up in the food processor to make the necessary crumbs.

I thought I could de-bone the lamb leaving a neat cavity in which to place the stuffing mixture – ha ha very funny. When you look at a lamb leg it appears that the bone is fairly straight – it goes in one end and out the other. Boy how wrong can I be. The unseen section of bone has all sorts of knobbly bits attached making it almost impossible for an amateur butcher to neatly carve out so I decided to split the whole thing down the middle, hack out the bone, stuff, then tie the whole thing back together with string. When you think of it, the knobbly bits would be required to hold the lambs leg muscles in place otherwise they would be walking around the paddocks with their thighs around their ankles – a bit like kids walking around school with the socks down!

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Roast Lamb with Sweet Fruit Glaze

This is my favourite way of cooking lamb and lamb chops.



Ingredients
Leg or forequarter of lamb
Soy sauce
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
Chopped fresh rosemary tips (from garden)
Chopped garlic
Mixed herbs (dried)
Sweet fruit Chutney
Cornflour

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