Roasted lamb

Yet another of the St. George’s day meals.

For this one you need:

Few vine branches. As long as your preferred cooking plate.
1 big piece of lamb meat, preferably leg
125 grams of butter
Lots of green onions
Green garlic (one stem)
Few cloves of grown garlic
2 tablespoons of ground red pepper
1 tablespoon non ground savory
ground black pepper and salt to your taste.

Preparation

The lamb leg is cleaned with warm water.

It’s salted thoroughly and left to rest for 10-15 minutes to absorb part of the salt. While resting, grind the green garlic and mix with butter, red pepper, savory and black pepper. This mixture will be used to smear over the leg later.

{If the lamb meat is from a bit older animal, a good idea is to set it in few liters of water from the previous evening with sea salt or table salt poured over. Four to five tablespoons salt is enough. And If you have some Bulgarian yogurt – pour few tablespoons in the water too. It kills the smell and makes the meat easier to cook.

(We even have few words for lambs  age. We call the 6 months old Shille[Шиле], while the younger brother is called Yarre, Agne or Yagne [Яре, Агне, Ягне], and oldest that are actually Rams and Sheep are called Oven[Овен] or Ovtza[Овца])}

You can use sharp knife to make small holes and to spike pieces garlic in the meat before roasting.

Get wide plate and pout about 1-2 cm water. Put the vine branches inside to form something like a grid. Put the lamb meat over the grid and pour as much water as to cover the grid. The meat is then smeared with the mix and put in the oven on medium fire (takes few hours to bake big piece of lamb).

If the meat starts to dry on top, get a spoon and pour part of the broth formed of the roasted meat juices and water around the grid. Generously.

It’s excellent with dry red wines.

Also called “pope’s stew“. It’s often cooked on St. George’s day (6-th may) when a lot of male lambs are sacrificed after the end of the Easter’s fasting. It’s very tasty and filling stew. Anyway – If you don’t have or can’t afford fresh lamb meat, probably your local store should have non-frozen cutlets. It is very important to choose pink meat (look at the picture below). Pink means fresh. If it goes brown, then it’s not lamb or not fresh enough.

Lamb's shoulder meat

For 2 dishes you will need:

• 1 medium lamb shoulder
• 600 grams (1 pound) of small onions
• 3 cloves garlic
• 50 grams butter
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 table spoons sunflower oil
• 1 small ground tomato without skin
• 2-3 tea spoons of cumin
• 1 table spoon red pepper
• dozen leaves of spearmint
• salt to your taste.

Preparation

The onions are poured with boiling water and are left to cool naturally. They are much easier to peel that way. The meat’s bones are cut and removed and the meat is washed in warm water. With the clean meat we do dices about 2 cm (1 inch). The butter and the oil are heated in deep frying pan on strong flame or hot plate and the meat dices is fried on every side.
When turning the lamb dices on last side, we put the heat to medium and leave it that way to keep steaming for 30 minutes.
We add the peeled onions and sliced garlic in the pan and spread the ground red pepper over them. Add the ground tomato. Pour hot water so all the stew is covered. Salt, ground cumin and bay leaf.
Leave it for another 30 minutes with pan lid to cook and before you remove it (literally the last few minutes) add a dozen of spearmint leaves.