Lamb Provencale, Roast Potatoes & Runner Beans

A few times a year my beloved Slow Cooker is dragged from its hiding place on top of the fridge and its normally to slowly cook lamb. This month I've committed myself to finally empty out our freezer, and fell upon a pack of rump steak lamb. I faltered slightly - not sure if I needed to slow roast rump of lamb (my recipe stated neck chops) the interweb offered little guidance, but going o the assumption that surely any lamb will be tasty after a good 8 hours in a trusty slow cooker I went ahead.

I inherited this recipe from my mother (as I did the Slow Cooker - which is probably at least 30 years old, vintage as they say on ebay) and it's probably one of the best I own, the simplicity of the ingredients and of the laissez faire method allowed me to spend the day getting to grips with my Java Open University course, an ongoing hindrance to my weekend fun having.

Ingredients:

2 x lamb rump steaks
1 tin Tomatoes
mushrooms
1 onion
2 cloves garlic

1. Prepare your vegetables, slice the onions, finely chop the garlic and slice the mushrooms.
2. Add a small amount of olive oil to a frying pan and brown the meat. Add the meat to the small cooker.
3. Lightly 'brown' the onions, garlic and mushrooms in the same pan.
4. Add the veg and the tine of tomatoes to the slow cooker, put the lid on, and leave for around eight hours (perhaps
less if you have a slightly nicer model!)

And we're done :) Giving me six and a half hours before worrying about my roast potatoes and my runner beans.

A few weeks ago I opened a tin of confit de canard and made a cassoulet. As a result I now have a lovely tub full of duck fat sitting in the fridge, so, my method for some of the crunchiest roasties is here:

Unpeeled Potatoes (mine were a bit long in the tooth)
Duck Fat (substitute with goose fat, or lard, or olive oil for a healthy option)

1. Parboil the potatoes, five to ten mins, until the potatoes are just soft when pricked with a fork.
2. Drain the potatoes and return to the pan over the heat, the potatoes need to dry for a few seconds. Take the pan off
the heat.
3. Add around 2 dessert spoons of plain flour to the pan with the potatoes, then jiggle the pan around, allowing the flour
to stick to the potatoes and the edges to rough up slightly.
4. Set the oven to the maximum setting, put a few dessert spoons of duck fat in a roasting tray and stick in the oven to
get hot. The melted fat needs to be very hot, almost to smoking point.
5. Removed the roasting tin and add the potatoes to the roasting tin and roll around allowing the potatoes to fry lightly
on each side in the hot fat.
6. Add the potatoes to the oven, and set the timer for an hour, turn the potatoes every 20 mins.


Now for the runner beans, not too much a story to tell, apart from to let you marvel at my new lakeland steamer. It's a metal flower looking device which fits any size pan, and should be versatile enough to let me steam fish in a wok and steam any vegetable in any sized pan, It's fab, buy one!


And eight hours later we're done , the finished article:


Dessert was the ever-giving cheesecake, tasting even nicer by dinner time :]