Slow cooked lamb with two stuffings

 

 

 

Sunday, 27 December 2009

Slow cooked lamb with two stuffings

 

Moving on from my last blog post about cooking, here’s a new one from Christmas Day, 2009.

(NOTE: The basis for this recipe can be found here on the Channel4.com website.)

STAGE ONE

Ask your local butcher to prepare you a suitable boned-out piece of lamb. For this recipe, a 1.5kg chump gigot chop (of lamb) was used:-

STAGE TWO

Remove packaging and fat side facing down, open out the joint as far as possible before stuffing:-

Set meat aside.

STAGE THREE

The stuffing. In this case, I went for two quite different ones as I could not decide which one I preferred.

Stuffing One:-

3-4 cloves garlic
6-8 fillets anchovies (not available so used 2 – 3 spring onions)
1 tbsp capers
flat-leaf parsley
olive oil
mustard
crushed black pepper

1. Crush and chop garlic, place anchovies on top of garlic and chop again.

2. Add capers and chop again, then plenty of flat-leafed parsley to the other ingredients and chop once more.

3. Place chopped mixture into a bowl, add a trickle of olive oil and mustard to bring it all together and pepper to taste.

Stuffing Two:-

one cupful of uncooked haggis
125g dried ready-to-eat apricots, chopped
75g fresh white breadcrumbs
leaves from 3 sprigs fresh rosemary, chopped
grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
wee dram of fine single malt scotch whisky
olive oil

1. Mix the stuffing ingredients together in a bowl and season well with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

You should then have something resembling this:-

Stage FOUR

Bring back the already prepared joint and by the spoon and then the hand, it’s time to get stuffing. Spread all over the inside (for this recipe, half and half) of the opened-out lamb, covering all cut surfaces and into any crevices.

One should now have something like this:-

Stage FIVE aka the difficult bit.

Roll up the gigot of lamb and tie it together with string to make a neat parcel.

Having never done anything like this before, this was a tad on tricky side. Two pairs of hands were required and this was the best we could manage under the circumstances:-

Stage SIX

Place on a roasting tray in a pre-heated oven at 220°C (gas mark 7) for 40 minutes, then turn the oven down to 150°C (gas mark 2) for approximately 2-2 ½ hours until tender.

(By twenty minutes in, I soon realised that I should have listened to my Mum and put a lid on it. Things were getting a tad smokey in the kitchen).

After the 40 minute mark and having reduced the heat as instructed, time to chillax. PHEW !

Stage SEVEN

With an hour to go, add some frozen seasonal veggies into the oven (e.g. roast potatoes and parsnips.)

Prepare some more veggies for the microwave (in this case, peas, mushy peas and broccoli):-

Also prepare some gravy, of course. Went for the easy method with a sachet of Colman’s lamb gravy powder, and 1/2 a pint of water. Seasoned it with a dollop or two of blackcurrant jelly, (another) dram of whisky, chopped rosemary, most of the juices from the roasing tin and salt & pepper.

(Note the slight scortching from not using a lid as mentioned in Stage SIX).

Stage EIGHT

Time to get the carving knives (in this case, machine) out having rested the meat for 10 mins.

Stage NINE

Find somewhere appropriate to serve and eat. Oh, this looks nice:-

“Nom nom nom” time…..

Posted by Graham Steel at 09:01

Labels: christmas, local butcher, meat, scottish lamb, slow cooked

 

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“Sorry, we will only allow you to email the PDF to one researcher”….

Originally posted on January 4, 2012 by Graham Steel

This re-post is namely prompted by this post Elsevier steps up its War On Access by Mike Taylor.

Not all of the url’s work since the original host no longer exists. I’ve done my best.

A brief exchange on Twitter yesterday between @David_Dobbs ,  @para-sight and to a lessor extent myself, reminded me of a story from 2007 that until now, has never been told and prompted me to write this post.

(Essentially, they were trying to share a dead tree copy PDF).

@David_Dobbs David Dobbs

@para_sight Get a ScanSnap. V fast. Then pay someone to title/index them. I did 4 files drawers, now it’s all on my hard drive.

The story in question involved a lot of emails, a few phone calls and I can’t be bothered reading through all the emails again, but I’ve glanced through most of them and recall the story in ma head anyways.

In late 2006/early 2007, I established contact with Feature Writer, Janyce Hamilton in America. I provided her with some useful information for a piece she was working on at that time.

Her next piece which is the one this post relates to was going to be one on Prions and dentistry which she was working on to have published in the prestigious dental journal, California Dental Association (CDA).

After review, the piece was accepted for publication and she was sent 100 glossy reprints and I agreed to assist her in the dissemination process at least here in the UK.

We then discussed the fact that this snail mail method was a tad web 0.0 so what could we do collectively to come up with a better methodology?

The CDA at that time was Toll Access (it flipped to Open Access later that year as I blogged here) so neither of us at stage one of the dissemination process had an electronic copy. <sigh>

Janyce shipped me 10 reprints so it was my intention to snail mail these to my relevant contacts at The Department of Heath, CJD Surveillance Unit, Health Protection Agency and so on.

Stage two. Dang, we could sure do with a PDF copy. Hhhm. My scanner was defunct and the one we had at work was out of bounds.

So I sent a reprint to a colleague in the UK, but they were in America at the time.  A relative of theirs however, scanned a perfect high res. copy for me and emailed me it. BINGO !!!

Stage three. In the meantime, Janyce was in touch with the CDA to see whether or not they would send her the actual PDF and after much ado they did.

However, she received three conflicting emails.  I can’t recall in what order but

• “here is the PDF but we only allow you to email it to Prof. Stanley Prusiner“
• “we don’t want our copyrighted PDF flying about everywhere”
• “Go ahead. We’re working on opening access to the Journal so that everything older than six months will be available to everyone”.

In the end, the “official” PDF which was identical to our “home made version” WAS emailed to Prusiner, I emailed a large volume of copies in bulk dumps to loads of contacts. For a bit of fun, we both listened simultaneously to “Push The Button (Galvanize)” by The Chemical Brothers when I did this…. As you do

A day or so later, Janyce said:-

“Phase 4 completed today:

More than 100 copies of the article were snail-mailed to every single U.S. dental school dean today, as well as most of the dental editors of journals in the U.S. (and one in Canada). They will get that mailing by Friday. It was an expensive investment in terms of postage and copying costs.

I’m about done with the phases, as I’m sure you are in terms of this article”.

Man, this whole reprint thing was/is a right pain in the arse and to me is simply another money spinner for Journals especially so in the digital age we live in (well most of us).  Science is digital, baby….

The subject matter is not really important in terms of this post, but here is Prions: Transmissable Spongiform Encelphalopathies and Dental Transmission Risk Assessment   This article looks at the complex questions around the implications of emerging data on the abnormal prion protein and infection control during hospital-based procedures as well as dental and oral and maxillofacial surgeries.
Janyce Hamilton

And my response, also published in the CDA.

One Response to “Sorry, we will only allow you to email the PDF to one researcher”….

peicurmudgeon says:

January 5, 2012 at 3:46 pm

It’s been a few years since In was actively involved in research, but I recall quite a number of requests to authors for articles to have been filled by receiving a photocopy of the original. It was before scanning was ubiquitous, but filled the same niche as emailing a pdf.

Reply

“There’s Evian, then there’s tap water” – Fair Use

 

   Originally posted on my defunct blog Sunday, 14 June 2009

 

“I’ve always felt that personal use (ie among you, your family and friends) should be totally unrestricted”. Thomas Dolby 2007

—

Some interesting recent discussions about “Fair Use” in the blogosphere.

Also see this post on the i9606 blog and Paper Chase by Craig Powell over at Nature Network.

These and other similar discussions will continue. The stark reality however with regards to p2p file sharing in terms of PDF’s is that this has been happening for years and in my own experience, 90% of Authors that I contact seeking a copy of a PDF results in the file being shared. IMHO, services such as Mendeley provide a means to an end to do this (as in sharing PDF’s) in a much more structed manner.

—

One of McDawg’s musical hero’s, Thomas Dolby thoughts about “Fair Use” in terms of music can be found here on his blog:-

Posted 2/15/2007
Q: Thomas,
The ubiquitous mix tape (well, the mix CD now.) It’s a staple of fledgling romances all over the planet. People mix up music from their collections, make a compilation, and send it off as a token of love, affection, or misguided passion… I know you, like many musicians, have strong feelings about the illegal reproduction of your music. But what do you say to those folks who want to zap off their emotions in a happy jumble of songs? Is the mix CD evil? Or should it be seen as a way to expand an artist’s audience (while helping some hapless romantic express himself?)
-Nancy

A: I’ve always felt that personal use (ie among you, your family and friends) should be totally unrestricted. That’s the best way to share music, and to discover it. But there’s clearly a huge moral difference between personal use, and wholesale mass pirating, duplication and distribution, to anonymous millions of Internet users. The challenge is, how to fairly use technology or legislation to allow the one and prevent the other? It’s almost impossible to draw the line. And historically, the lobbyists, litigators, and politicians have been way behind the curve.

It takes decades for copyright law to catch up with technology, by which time technology has moved on. This struggle has been going on since the printing press–not to mention audio recording, broadcasting, piano rolls, jukeboxes, cable TV and cassette tapes. While I have always fought against people who disregard the copyright notice on my records and go ahead and rip my music for the purpose of sharing it via illegal P2P networks, I am the first to admit that a certain proportion of music should be and always has been free.

As musicians we need to give out free samples, to get the audience hooked so they will come back for more. It’s the drug dealer model! To that end, we produce music at our own expense and give it to radio stations who make money of the advertising revenue; we produce videos that we give to MTV so they can sell ads to Nike and American Express; we do this to get wide exposure so new fans can discover our music. Without that there will be no demand for any kind of for-sale product. And the Internet is the most effective method yet of getting that exposure. So clearly we need to embrace it. This is a tough time because we’re still at a cusp.

In the end I believe it will all settle down–music will be cheap and easy enough to buy, that the convenience of obtaining music legally will outweigh the few cents you save by pirating it. There’s Evian, then there’s tap water 🙂

Posted by Graham Steel at 04:55

Labels: fair use, PDF sharing