Skip to navigation.

The Union Jack

Toad in the Hole

Ingredients

Method

Preheat the oven to 180o.

There are too many complicated recipes for batter out there. Try mine - it's easy! Pop the eggs, flour, butter, water, milk and salt into a blender. Blend. Set aside. You now have batter :-)

Fry the onion in the oil until transparent. Add sage and fry for a couple more minutes.

Place the sausages in a casserole dish and pour the batter over them. Pour the onion mixture on top.

Bake until the mixture has set (usually at least 40 minutes!). Serve plain, or with a rich gravy.

Variation

Wrap each sausage in a rasher of smoked bacon first!

Shepherd's Pie

For some reason, there seem to be a bunch of recipes out there for Shepherd's pie that use beef. Obviously, a real shepherd's pie should use lamb or, at a push, mutton.

Serves 4.

Ingredients

Which Herbs?

I tend to use either:

Method

Preheat the oven to 180o.

Fry the onion, celery and carrot until the onion becomes transparent. Add lamb and cook, stirring occasionally, until the lamb is brown. Add peas, herbs and the vegemite/marmite or worchestershire sauce. Simmer for 5 to 10 minutes.

Thicken the mixture with gravy powder before transferring to a casserole dish. Press the mixture down, so that it has a nice, firm, smooth surface.

Spread the mashed potato over the top and then sprinkle on cheddar and more herbs. Bake in the oven at 180o for at least 30 minutes.

Serve by itself, or with some chips.

Roast Leg of Lamb With All The Trimmings

This should serve 4 or even 5! You may want to also serve it with some autumnal vegetables (such as swede, parsnip, carrot, cauliflower, brocolli or spinach) although I haven't included details of how to cook them here.

Ingredients

Lamb

Gravy

Roast Potato

Sausages

Yorkshire Puddings

Method

Preheat the oven to 180o.

Put the lamb leg into a baking tray. Poke about 12 holes into the lamb with a sharp knife. Insert garlic and rosemary (about 1/4 clove of garlic and 3 leaves of rosemary) into each hole. Pour over about 1/2 glass of the wine and drizzle with oil. Spinkle some salt and pepper on.

Put the lamb in the oven. It will need to stay in for 30 minutes, plus an additional 30 minutes for each 500g of meat - for example, a 2kg joint of lamb will need to be cooked for 150 minutes.

This should give you a long time to prepare the trimmings while the lamb itself is cooking. Cut the potatos into small chunks - about 3 cubic inches each (that is NOT 3" by 3" by 3" - it's about 1.5" by 1.5" by 1.5"!). Put the potato chunks into a baking tray and sprinkle with salt, pepper and rosemary. Drizzle them with oil. Chop the onion finely and throw that in the baking tray too. Stir it all together and pop it into the oven with the lamb.

Put a saucepan half-full of water on to boil.

Poke the sausages with a fork and then fry them in the oil until they are only just cooked (you don't want to cook them too thoroughly because they're going into the oven soon!). Allow the sausages to cool until you can handle them.

Slowly stir gravy powder into the boiling water until it reaches a nice thick consistancy. Add wine, rosemary, salt and pepper. Turn the heat down until the gravy is barely simmering.

Now wrap a rasher of streaky bacon around each sausage. Open the oven and carefully place the bacon-wrapped sausages on top of the roast potato. This will allow the potato to absorb some of the flavours of the meat and will cook the bacon. While the oven is open, take the lamb out.

Pour the juices that have collected in the bottom of the lamb's tray into thr gravy. Now pour the rest of the wine and a little oil over the lamb and put it back in the oven.

Until the lamb is nearly done (about 20 minutes or so before it is due to come out), you don't need to do anything more than stir the gravy occasionally.

When the lamb is nearly ready, put the eggs, flour, butter, milk, water and salt into a blender and mix them together. You now have batter. Grease a yorkshire pudding tray and fill it with the batter. Put this in the over for 10 to 15 minutes.

Your roast is now ready! Slice the lamb and divide between the 4 plates. Put 3 yorkshire puds and 3 sausages on the plates too, along with roughly 1/4 of the roast onion/potato mixture. Pour the gravy over the top.