Roast Lamb (With Panko and Pine Nut Crust)

Click on photos to enlarge

There are a lot of great food blogs out there, but an unforunately small number of them devote sufficient time to lamb. In doing my small part to alter this tragic scenario, I offer this roast lamb recipe that I enjoyed last night with a tomato feta salad and the aforeposted hummus...

I have to admit to it not being quite as succulent as this braised lamb, but it was still quite good. It also gave me a great excuse to use my digital meat probe thermometer/timer. I know, you're jealous. But they're actually not that expensive if you get one, as I did, at an outlet mall. And 'Merica is just filled with malls of all sorts, so start shopping and pretty soon you too can probe digitally.

The marinade was simply mint, dijon mustard, olive oil, garlic, and lemon juice. The "crust" was made of ingredients I had left over from meals gone by: panko crumbs and chopped pine nuts, along with some mint, onion, & butter.

Truthfully, the tomato feta salad was really just a bit of spring mix surrounded by tomato wedges and slices of a really creamy french feta, all of it drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice. After carving the lamb, something I have yet to truly get the hang of, I served it with the "salad," the hummus posted yesterday, and some warm flatbread. I recommend tearing off a piece of the flatbread, dip it in the hummus, top that with a tomato wedge, a spinach leaf, and a wee chunk of feta. If there's room left, a chunk of the lamb as well. So good.

Roasted Lamb (With Panko and Pine Nut Crust)

1 leg of lamb roast (on the smallish side)

Marinade:
1/3 cup fresh mint
3 cloves garlic
Juice of 1/2 lemon
4 Tbsp. Olive oil
1 Tbsp. dijon mustard
salt and pepper

Crust:
3 Tbsp. pine nuts
1/4 cup panko crumbs
1/4 cup onion, diced
3 Tbsp. fresh mint, chopped
1 1/2 Tbsps. butter

1) Blend all marinade ingredients in a food processor and seal lamb in a large ziploc with the marinade for at least a few hours
2) Place lamb on a wire rack in a roasting pan and place in an oven preheated at 325 degrees for about an hour (your thermometer should read at about 125 degrees at this point.
3) For the crust: melt butter in a sautee pan, sautee onions until translucent, then add remaining ingredients and sautee for 5 minutes more.
4) After the lamb has roasted for an hour, take it out and smooth the crust on top, return to the oven and bake for about another hour. For a medium rare roast, the temperature at the center of the roast should be about 140 degrees, so be vigilant. It will cook a bit more when you take it out, bringing itself up to 145 degrees. The crust will have started to be toasty brown.
5) Carve. What I think I'll try next time, is taking the leftover liquid of the marinade, adding some yoghurt, and reducing it all in a sautee pan to have a tasty, minty green sauce for the lamb.