Posts Tagged ‘lamb’
Most days I prefer to leave the kitchen alone, empty, untouched except for the occasional boiling of the kettle. I walk through it quickly to get the outside and, with these summer days and long nights, my eye is drawn to the glass wall looking over the garden instead of to the stove.
But I had an urge to write about lamb. How I miss lamb! It’s almost a physical thing. The drought, the cost of petrol, the wars .. have made lamb so much more expensive, I eat it now only once a fortnight.
When I was growing up, it was lamb that constituted the major part of my diet. It was cheap and plentiful, at the time there were 80 times more sheep than people in Australia. I have eaten more than my 80 sheep I can assure you.
Looking back, it’s not the diet that would be recommended nowadays. Fatty lamb 3-4 times a week, accompanied by potatoes mashed with cream and butter or roasted in lard, together with the silverbeet from the garden. Dessert was rhubarb or quince (also from the garden) covered in thick creamy custard, sugar and coconut. Every day I consumed a pint of full cream milk, a handful of thick slices of bread slathered in loads of yellow butter and about a soup spoon of vegemite. I’m sure such food would kill me now! What saved me were the things I hated – the daily bowl of wheatgerm and the awful dessert spoon of cold liver oil. Why the cod liver oil? Simple. Children in England needed cod liver oil as they had scarcely any sunshine. Here in Australia where the sun shone 365 days a year it was thought necessary to feed us as if we were English. Same reason we learned French in school. France is very close to England.
In any case, here is my Classic Roasts : Lamb with Rosemary
