Roast lamb with spiced apricot and pine nut stuffing and gravy

I cooked this today for Sunday lunch. It's dead easy to make and absolutely delicious! It combines classic leg of lamb with apricots, pine nuts and Ras el Hanout, a Moroccan spice blend sometimes called 35 spice mix. It is the defining smell of tagine, and wonderful to cook with in many other ways. The sauce or gravy is thick, intense, meaty, aromatic and a little sweet to balance with the lamb.

You can buy Ras el Hanout ready mixed from supermarkets if you don’t happen to have any of the real deal from Morocco hanging around. Or if you prefer, you can make up something equally tasty at home. The exact ingredients are up to you, but you might start with about teaspoon each of black pepper, coriander, ginger, cinnamon and cloves. Then you could add in perhaps half a teaspoon each of some or all of allspice, cardamom, cumin, fennel, fenugreek, nutmeg, paprika, turmeric or chilli. If you can find any dried rose petals to throw in, so much the better.

Sunday roast chicken with kaffir lime, coriander and lemongrass

I've been meaning to try to record one of my recipes in photos for ages, but never quite got around to it. So when I decided this morning to make a sort of Asian twist on a classic Sunday roast, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to give it a go. The food seems to have gone down rather well. As for the recipe and photos, we'll see...

The idea with the chicken here is to take classic herb-buttered chicken, and swap in lime leaves, coriander and lemon grass in place of traditional English herbs. l like to get the butter under the skin of the chicken: this puts the chicken flesh in direct contact with the herbs, so of course if soaks up more flavour.

The gravy is a simple, last minute concoction, just drawing on the ingredients from the chicken with a little lemon to sharpen it up. I'm not sure how English-style roasties would stack up with this, so I settled on tasty, whole-roast, skin-on baby potatoes. As for other veg: we stuck with honeyed carrots, but some pak choi or broccoli stems would have gone down a treat too.

So here's what I came up with - let me know what you think!