Easter roast

I try to make Easter dinner something out of the ordinary and often succeed, although not always in a good way.  Much as I try, I can’t ignore that twice I’ve set off the smoke detectors and summoned the fire department while roasting small game birds.  I’m not going for three.

But operating within the traditional framework of special dinners doesn’t come all that easily for me, especially when the special dinner includes a roast of some sort.  For one thing, I’m usually cooking for two people.  Try and buy a size-appropriate roast for two people!  The closest I could find this year was a 3 lb roast lamb from my favorite butcher in the Italian Market.  To put that in context, my true love and I had a larger than normal dinner on Easter Sunday, leftovers on Monday, sandwiches on Tuesday, and I’m estimating that there is at least 10-12 oz of meat left.  I’m getting a little tired of lamb.

The other issue with roasts is speed.  I’m used to working very quickly.  Come home from work, change clothes, then prepare a protein, two vegetable sides, and a green salad in 45 minutes or less (while simultaneously providing supper for our two parrots that includes, at a minimum, hot oatmeal and hot green beans – but that’s another blog).  So I work quickly, trying to pack as much flavor into some basic preparations as possible in as short a time as possible.  Even on weekends when there’s more time, I’m still usually working in a 45 minute time frame although I give myself the liberty to work on ingredients that might take all afternoon to prep.

But a roast is different.  You need to allocate nearly all day for it, but most of the time you aren’t actually doing anything.  That is so foreign and so frustrating for me.  Standing around waiting for something to be done in the oven just doesn’t seem normal to me.

When I said all day, that included taking the roast out of the refrigerator at 8 am so it would be more or less at room temperature when it was ready for the oven.  Task one done.  The next step is to create a schedule.  I wanted to serve at 2:30 pm.  The roast needs to rest for 15 minutes before slicing, which means I should be taking it out of the oven no later than 2:15 pm.  That, however, assumes it is done perfectly at 2:15pm and I’m taking it on faith that 90 minutes will produce a roast that is somewhere between medium rare and rare.  Since I have to build in a margin of error, I’ll aim for being done at 2:00 pm.  Resting a few extra minutes isn’t a problem, but having a raw roast at 2:15 is.

So based on everything I know, I’ll need 90 minutes for a boneless 3 lb lamb roast, which means it should go in the oven at 12:30.  Say a half hour for prep work and I need to get serious at noon.  I then edit my schedule (thank God for whiteboards) to include prepping and cooking the potatoes and carrots, and getting the salad together and I’m ready to do something else for three hours before taking knife to garlic.  Three hours!  What kind of cooking is this, anyway?

So at noon, I start chopping the garlic and the rosemary, add olive oil, salt, and pepper, and create a thickish paste to spread all over the now room temperature roast.  Place the roast on a rack in a baking dish and put in a pre-heated 450° oven.  Fifteen minutes, turn down the heat to 325° and that’s it.  For the next hour or so, I prepped the veggies (10 minutes max) and paced back and forth across the kitchen thinking I should be doing something.  I am not used to waiting in my kitchen.  The suspension builds as 2:00 pm approaches – will the center be raw and require another 45 minutes, completely blowing my schedule apart?  Or will the center be grey and tough, ruining my roast?

I took it out at 2:00 and checked the temperature (a digital instead-read thermometer is one of the world’s truly great inventions) and it was 125°, a little less than my target of 135° for rare (most folks would go for 145° but we both prefer our red meat on the rare side).  Another 10 minutes and we’ll be just fine.  At 2:15 I take out the roast and let it sit while I assemble the rest of the meal.   Assemble the salad, take the potatoes and carrots out of the oven and plate them for the table, warm up the rolls, put the sauces in serving bowls, set the table, pour the drinks, and about 20 minutes later I’m ready to carve.  Perfect.

All in all, everything turned out pretty much exactly as I wanted and the meal was wonderful, despite my trepidation about relying on the oven to produce the centerpiece.  Why do I find putting a roast in an oven and then waiting hours to see how it turns out to be so much more difficult than assembling a nine ingredient mis-en-place and then working two frying pans at once for four intense minutes?  Maybe I’ll grow out of it.

Recipe – roast lamb

Ingredients

3-4 lb boneless leg of lamb

1/4 cup rosemary, finely chopped

garlic, chopped, to taste (I like garlic and used nearly an entire bulb, but YMMV)

1/2 tsp salt

1 tbl black pepper, freshly ground (this is another “to taste” item – I love black pepper and use a lot of it)

1 tbl olive oil

Directions

Take the roast from fridge in time for it to come up to room temperature. Preheat oven to 450°.  Combine the rosemary, garlic, salt, pepper, and olive oil in a thick paste.  Rub the paste all over the roast, not forgetting the bottom.  Place the roast on a rack in a baking sheet and place in the center of the oven.  In fifteen minutes, reduce the heat to 325° and roast for 75-105 minutes until you reach the state of estimated desired doneness (Rare is 135°, medium rare 145°, medium 155°).

When ready, check for doneness with a thermometer.   If it needs more time, put it back in the oven for a few more minutes.  If it is OK, remove the roast and let it sit for 15 minutes while you work on the rest of the meal.

Slice and serve.