I Don't Do Bland...

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Pictured, tonight's repast of lamb loin chops roasted in olive oil and rose harissa, with boiled tenderstem broccoli and what are now becoming a personal standby: Greek-style potato wedges with lemon, oregano and garlic, served with the roasting juices as a sauce. Now, I didn't know I was going to cook this until we got back from town and Jane presented me with a bunch of random ingredient choices that she'd bought in Marks on her lunch break today., a bit like an episode of 'Ready, Steady Cook'. As I've said before in these pages, when we moved to North Wales forty-three and a bit years ago, I barely knew how to boil water, let alone cook food. But, armed with the experience I've managed to amass in the intervening decades, I knew straight away what I'd cook tonight, even though, as always with jazz cookery, I was riffing it. Anyhow, this an easy and extremely tasty Sunday supper for two:

Marinate four chops in a roasting dish in three dessert-spoons [tablespoons, if American] of rose harissa and a good, nay generous, glug of good olive oil. Coat the chops well and cover. Marinate for a half-hour or so. Meanwhile, take two decent-sized baking potatoes - they do work the best - and slice each into eight wedges. Pop into a bowl, add a goodly quantity of olive oil, a generous [chef-sized] pinch or two of sea salt, the juice of at least half a lemon, and a good teaspoon or so of dried oregano and a few scrunches of black pepper. 

Preheat the oven to 220C, and bring up a roasting dish to temperature for the spuds. Place the marinated potatoes into the hot dish and return to the oven. Give them around fifteen to twenty minutes roast and add more olive oil if the first lot has been absorbed completely by the spuds; then put the chops into the oven. Roast for half an hour, then check. Keep going until the chops are to your liking, then remove and rest for a good twenty minutes while you finish the potatoes off: just use your eyes and nose to gauge progress. In the last twenty minute slot, boil the salted broccoli to the level of chew that you like, drain, cover and put aside. When the spuds are done, serve the whole lot, using whatever oily residues are left in both pans as the sauce: trust me it will taste really good! Always remember, olive oil is your friend and more is always better than less... Post-prandial caveat: monster flavours: epic spuds, as expected; but I would advise heading for those tiny, very fatty little lamb chops for this: loin is a little too lean for this style of cooking. Nevertheless, a little belter. Oh, and just one more thing: I intend to try this out using a very fatty shoulder of lamb on a very slow roast; keep you posted...

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