Slow Roasted Lamb, Aubergine Jam and Garlicky Yoghurt

Bank Holiday weekends are an odd thing, you think you love them and then the reality of them is that you get very bored of your house, your family and the contents of your fridge!

This Bank Holiday weekend was different though because my dear friends, Rachel and Andy, came to stay with their A-mazing dog, Nessa. Nessa is a sharpei and as we discovered in the park on Sunday, an American and not Chinese sharpei at that!

This is Nessa:

The Lovely Nessa

I had such a lovely weekend, long walks with Nessa and curled up in the village pub chatting with a pint.

I decided to cook on the Saturday night and wanted something we could eat up in the garden if the weather were nice or around the dining table if it rained which it spent the entire weekend doing in fits and starts.

This recipe is such a nice thing to cook for a group of people, or just the 3 of us! The lamb is fall off the bone tender and the aubergine jam and garlic yoghurt make a great pairing. Someone described this as like a posh kebab when I cooked it recently with flatbreads! I have mentioned the Pomegranate molasses previously and how I made my own and this time round, I bought some from Sainsbury’s just to compare it and I think I prefer my own homemade. It seemed to have a more complex flavour and was thicker so the marinade stuck to the lamb and made it sticky which is what I was looking for! I would therefore recommend making your own.

This recipe also calls for harissa paste and I had to make my own the first time as no shops in Liverpool or Abingdon seemed to stock it, finally Mum gave me a jar for my birthday (We spoil each other in our family!) and since then the recipe for it and mentions of it have been in every magazine and book and newspaper but it’s very easy to make if you can’t find any.

Slow Roasted Lamb with Pomegranate Molasses

• 2kg shoulder of lamb on the bone
• 9 cloves garlic, roughly chopped or crushed with your garlic crusher
• 6½ tbsp pomegranate molasses
• 6½ tbsp runny honey
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• 4 tbsp harissa paste
• juice from 4 lemons
• leaves from a small bunch of mint, torn

1. Pierce the lamb all over, making deep slits in it with a very sharp knife. Crush the nine cloves of garlic to a paste with some seasoning, then add all the other ingredients for the lamb and pound some more. Put the meat in a huge piece of foil set in a roasting-tin (you may need to do some origami with the tin foil) and pull up the sides so that none of the marinade will run out. Pour on the marinade, turning over the lamb so that it goes on both sides. Put in the fridge and leave to marinate for about 12 hours or overnight if possible.
2. Preheat the oven to 200 C. Pull the foil over the lamb and seal to form a tent. Place in the oven and immediately reduce the heat to 160 C. Cook for three to four hours, basting with the juices every so often. The lamb is cooked when you can pull the meat apart with a fork. Leave to stand for 10 minutes.

Slow Roasted

Aubergine Jam

• a large aubergine, cubed (quite small cubes)
• 2 tomatoes, cubed roughly
• a tsp of ground cumin
• a tsp of ground cinnamon
• 50ml sherry vinegar
• 1 crushed clove of garlic
• 1 chopped red chilli
• 2 tbsp pomegranate molasses
• 50g muscavado sugar
• olive oil

1. Place a frying pan over a medium heat and add olive oil. Add the aubergine in batches and fry until soft and brown. You may have to add some more oil as the aubergines will absorb loads of oil!
2. Add the cubed tomatoes and cook until the skins soften. When soft, add the spices, the garlic and chilli and the vinegar and the molasses and stir. Add the sugar.
3. Simmer over a low heat for about 30 minutes or until the liquid is absorbed and the mix has taken on a jam consistency

Fry the aubergine in batches

Add the tomatoes

Cooking down the jam

Serve with warm flatbreads, heaps of pomegranate seeds and mint leaves and some garlicky yoghurt, made by crushing some garlic and squeezing some lemon juice into natural plain yoghurt.

Delicious!

Kimos

Just around the corner from my house, too close actually, is a strange little walkway of shops called Myrtle Parade. Except it doesn’t really have any shops of use but it does have a plethora of restaurants of foreign extraction, Malaysian, Greek, Chinese, African, and an angry man in a booze shop. It’s not an attractive little area, it’s recently become far more attractive as they removed the recycling bins that had become a waste ground for all the rubbish in South Liverpool. It’s still not a pretty area and it can be quite uncomfortable at night when groups of hoodies circle on their bikes with their vicious dogs. The dogs also leave their mess behind which adds to the lovely atmosphere! However, it is the neighbourhood and I’m strangely fond of it especially when it widens out  to the little row of shops on Myrtle Street itself.

So like an angry giant stomping into this is TESCO. There are at least 10 Tesco branches within the 5 mile radius of our house but now they are building one on our doorstep and I finally understand the bewildering frustration of the all ladies in our village at home who stood up to be counted against the building of a new CoOp. However, it’s not that they’re building another TESCO even and it’s certainly not the desecration of what was an extremely ugly building but the little shops that I’m worried about. Most importantly S&A International, commonly known as the green and yellow shop. Run by the jolliest man in all of England, the green and yellow shop has everything you could ever need, well with the exception of pork products! The jolliest man in all of England knows everybody in the neighbourhood. He knows when people haven’t been in for a while, he looks out for all of the children in the area and he wishes you genuine luck every time you buy a lottery ticket. I am scared for the jolliest man in all of England, who incidentally to paint a clearer picture for you looks like the genie from Aladdin, because I am terrified TESCO will take his business and I would hate that. The awful thing, though, is that I will probably use TESCO, it is frighteningly close to the house and I need to purchase pork somewhere locally! But I want to make sure that if there is anything I could have previously bought in the green and yellow shop that I continue to do so.

So people rise up against the might of TESCO and if you can buy something from a small shop, please do.

So to the point of this post, I am going to write about Kimos which is on the same small bank of shops as the green and yellow shop. Most commonly known as little Kimos, it is the smaller brother of the enormous Kimos on Mount Pleasant which used to be a more modest affair and lost its sparkle when it moved to its now-no-longer-new premises two doors down. I have always been a bigger fan of the little Kimos because it backs on to the university and is where I spent the majority of my first year between lessons.

Now I could recount a recent visit but the sad truth is that I go so often that I thought I would amalgamate all of my trips into a generic review. So Kimos, packed at lunchtime and busy at all other times, Kimos is the perfect drop in cafe and takeaway. It is always full of a wonderful mix of people, teenage boys looking hard, young girls in lots of make up and their smartest clothes, the teachers of the university, parents of students visiting and a couple of requisite hippies.

They have recently had a major refurb inside which has created an upstairs. This is much more of a restaurant than the in/out of the cafe downstairs but they both dance to the same tune and the same menu. I have sat upstairs now and I think I like it even more than downstairs because it’s sparkly and it’s not quite as draughty which is important when you have come in for the hangover-busting power of their English breakfasts.

So the menu is an eclectic and diverse mix of Turkish/Greek/Moroccan/Arabic food mixed with classic British cafe food. Alongside English breakfast with a cup of tea is Kebdah, a mix of liver and red onions eaten as breakfast. There is wide array of cold sandwiches which are queued out the door for on a weekday lunchtime. There are hot sandwiches, one of my particular favourites being the club sandwich, with chicken, egg, cheese and salad and mayo. There are the expected pizzas, burgers and jacket potatoes but the real highlights exist in the kebabs, the tapas and the specials.

The kebabs are one of my real loves. Far from the kind of kebab that resembles someone’s thigh stuffed in a stringy, stale pitta on the way home from a night on the tiles, the Kimos kebab is a plate of fresh salad, hot pittas, a pile of chicken or lamb cooked in spices and mayonnaise and the hottest chilli sauce in the world. You can have this with the choice of fries, thin ones like McDonalds, or rice, perfectly cooked!

The tapas is wide and perfect. I love all of it but special mention has to be made of their own houmous. Anthony and I could live on their houmous alone. It’s so creamy and fresh. Strong with fresh garlic and packed full of chickpeas and tahini paste. We often have it to takeaway on the way home from work with a pile of fresh hot toasted pitta. Heaven!

The specials menu is unusual but interesting. As well as their own curry are listed various dishes that must be native to the Arabic countries the menu is based on, as well as the more obvious as lamb chops and fish and chips. I have to admit that I’ve never tried one but everytime I go, I say I will on the next visit!

There are no alcoholic drinks but you don’t mind because it’s very much a quick eat kind of a place and on a Sunday morning, with the papers, everyone is drinking the coffee and tea that come with the breakfasts.

It’s real comfort food, but it’s also exceptionally fresh tasting because of the amount of the fresh tomato, parsley and red onion salad that everything is stuffed with. It’s tasty and it’s quick and the girls behind the counter are more often than not friendly. It’s also super cheap from mains costing at most £7-8 and most things in the region of £5. It’s no wonder it’s a Myrtle Street institution. Long may it go on! I’d much rather have a sandwich from there than TESCO.