A fairly frugal and very delicious Sunday Dinner

I put a piece of lamb shoulder on the bone into the slow cooker mid Sunday morning. It only just fitted! I also put in a couple of healthy teaspoons of red currant jelly and a medium white onion, finely chopped. Plonked the lid on, put it onto the auto setting and ambled off. No liquid.

A few hours later I came back and found the pot now filled with gently bubbling lamb juice and fat. So I stirred it all around to mix in the red currant jelly, put the lid back on and turned it down to low.

At about half past six, I put the fan oven on at 150d and put the lamb and some Shetland Black potatoes (nearly all gone now, alas) in a roasting tray. I had also drained all the juices from the slow cooker into my fat separating jug. The actual juices went into a jug to make the gravy with and the fat went over the roasting potatoes. The lamb came out of the oven after about 45 minutes to rest, wrapped in foil. I turned the oven up to 200d to crisp up the potatoes, steamed the vegetables (peas, cabbage, runner beans and carrots) using some of the gravy juice, put the juice back in with the rest and made a gravy which I thickened with rice flour (I am a huge convert to using rice flour to thicken things!).

We had the left over lamb shredded and heated in a casserole with the left over gravy yesterday evening. I topped it with sliced potatoes and cooked it with the lid on until the potatoes were softened, then crisped them up with the lid off for about 15 minutes. And I had what was left over from that today for lunch.

They are running a telly program at the moment called Economy Gastronomy. I am really quite shocked by the amount of cooked foods that people just throw away when they are perfectly lovely ingredients for something else. We got five meal portions out of that lamb shoulder and the lamb juices, and they were all scrumptious. Can't really tell you how frugal it was, though. The shoulder came from that lamb I bought from Farmer Jayne back in June or July. But buying a whole lamb is a fairly economic way of buying meat, if you have the cash to hand in the first instance.