More soup, and slow roasted shoulder of lamb

Chicken, this time.

When I quartered a chicken before freezing it in useful little packages, I made a stock with the carcass and all the vegetables I had lying about that needed using up. This included some red cabbage, so the resulting broth had a strangely beetrooty look to it!

Yesterday I took the broth and added some chopped pieces of thigh meat and some finely chopped savoy cabbage and simmered everything all together (with the thigh bones but I took them out at the end of the simmering).

While all this was going on, I had a knuckle end piece of shoulder of lamb to ponder. I also had last week's finely sliced winter coleslaw vegetables in the fridge, and some ends of carrot and parsnip. So I put all the vegetables into a roasting dish, put the lamb shoulder on top and added half a bottle of white wine. No herbs. Herbs would have involved going out into the snowy wastes of our back garden and excavating with optimism!

Sometime over the weekend I was watching or listening to someone cooking something which they did at 70d for 6-7 hours. I hadn't been paying close attention, but it sounded intriguing. Although 70d doesn't sound very hygienic to me. But I thought I'd give something like it a go. So I covered the roasting dish with foil and put it in the oven at around 100d for four hours, basting occasionally. After 4 hours I moved the lamb down to the bottom of the oven, turned it up to 150 and put garlic potatoes and a rhubarb and apple crumble in the top of the oven.

When I took the lamb out to rest, I put the vegetables, juices and the steaming water for the actual serving vegetables into the blender and then put the result through a fine sieve. I thickened the gravy with rice flour, shredded the lamb and served it with garlic potatoes, broad beans, sprouts and carrots.

There was quite a lot of the delicious gravy left over. Seemed a pity to waste it. So I added it to my chicken and cabbage soup. I have to say - the end result was specatcular. So much so that I can only say that it is a good job there is 15 miles between me and the soup waiting for tomorrow and perhaps Wednesday!!!