DEFINITELY WORTH A 'GAMBOL'!!! (M&S Cook Butterflied Leg of Lamb)

Member Name: Skyedame

Product:	M&S Cook Butterflied Leg of Lamb
Date:	16/08/07 (274 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tasty, succulent, memorable

Disadvantages: None

This butterflied leg of lamb is marinated in olive oil and rosemary and drizzled with a sweet, rich glaze of wildflower honey & garlic…..

Oh my! That sounded so good and the photo on the packaging was of a moist, choice leg of lamb dripping in sweet juices, a scattering of rosemary spikes adhering to the sweet rich wildflower glaze….

M & S food is scrummy. I know it is a little more expensive (sometimes, though not always) than your usual supermarket fayre but you get what you pay for in this life and, like their knickers, M & S food can’t be faulted on its quality.

What to look for:

This product is part of the M & S Cook! range, which is additive free – no E numbers, stabilisers, preservatives, colours, flavourings or sweeteners.

The piece of meat comes in a good-sized, sturdy (can be used again for your own cooking), tin-foil oblong baking try, covered with an airtight see-through seal. This is in a cardboard ‘jacket’ on which is the photo of the succulent cooked lamb and, naturally, all cooking instructions are included.

The piece we bought was 580g which, apparently, is enough for 4 people. I’m sorry, but my husband and I ate the lot in one sitting – and we are not particularly greedy. But we were hungry and the lamb was so totally, melt-in-the-mouth orgasmic that we had to eat the lot. If we’d had to share with another two adults we’d have had to kill them.

To cook the lamb, all you need to do is – obviously – discard the outer packaging sleeve and the seal film.

The meat comes with a sachet of sauce which you snip open and pour over the meat ten minutes before the end of the cooking time. The sauce is generous and when mixed with the final juices of the cooked meat is so tasty you don’t (it would be sacrilege) need a gravy.

The sauce:

Wildflower Honey; Soy Sauce; Olive Oil, Tamarind Paste; Sugar; Mirin; Ginger Puree; Rosemary, Spirit vinegar, Fresh Lemon Juice, Cracked Black Pepper, Garlic Puree, Cornflour

(Mirin contains Rice Wine, Glucose Syrup, Water)

The product contains Soya, Wheat, Gluten

Taste:

Words almost fail. It was sweetish but not over-sweet which I would hate. That it was honey, there was no doubt. Normally, anything which comes prepared with garlic generally reeks of the stuff and the taste overrides everything but I could barely discern the garlic in this sauce it was so classy and restrained. In there was the Rosemary, cracked black pepper and ginger which complimented the sweetness of the sauce – there was no fighting for supremacy of the taste-buds and everything played nicely together.

When he’d finished his meal, my husband did something he hadn’t done since he was a little boy – got a dessert spoon and finished the sauce left pooled on his plate!

Cooking time and temperature:

In a conventional oven, the recommended cooking time is 30 minutes at 220º, after which add the contents of sachet evenly over the meat. Cook for a further 10 minutes.

Other cooking times are included for gas and fan ovens.

Lamb can be difficult to get just right. Cook too little and it is too pink and fleshy to be really good but overcook by five minutes and it loses all its pinkness and becomes dry.

And don’t get me started on temperamental ovens. We have a new oven which shocks us every time by overcooking stuff just milliseconds after we last looked at something ‘almost done’ so, not wishing to chance it, I took the temperature down and cooked this piece at 190º (Conventional oven) for 40 minutes – then another 10 minutes because it was a bit too pink. On reflection, I think that if I’d followed the cooking instructions on the packet the results would have been the same, so I think M&S have got it right.

Cost:

The day we went into M & S (it’s 100 miles away or I’d go and double check for you) there were some price reductions and we got our Butterflied Leg of Lamb for £5.99, which was a bargain. I’ve checked their website and from what I can see, it would normally sell for £8.99. Quite frankly, the meat was so beautiful, so moist, so tender and tasty that I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if I’d paid more.

Our local butcher has good meat and a piece of lamb like this would have cost about £8 – but I’d have had to rustle up my own marinade. My usual marinade of a squeezed orange, wholegrain mustard and honey and Rosemary overlaid during the cooking, is knocked for six compared to the wildflower honey glaze provided by M & S.

To accompany the lamb, we had baby new potatoes dotted with a little butter, frozen carrots and peas. In my defence, we had just done a 200-mile round trip and I wasn’t about to get stuck in to really serious cooking! But the result was so good, we are looking forward to our next trip to Inverness when I’ll be stocking up on more of this particularly gorgeous lamb because it is suitable for freezing.

We finished off this delicious meal with M & S Greek style natural probiotic yogurt+Greek cherry compote. Glorious – but that’s another review!


© Louise Saunders – 2007

Summary: Moist, succulent lamb ready prepared with a gorgeous glaze - Irresistible!