cooking challenge twenty: slow roast leg of lamb with crushed chickpeas

As you can probably tell from the above, I seem to have leaped over the final hurdle in my meat eating quest with great gusto. Now, I have made friends with my local butcher and am working my way through the various cuts of meat at my disposal. Amazing.

This roast took ALL day. I modified a recipe from the most recent Australian Gourmet Food & Travel (aka, my bible).

You will need:

1 x leg of lamb (mine was about enough for 6 people)
3 lemons
2 x 400g chickpeas
1/4 cup olive oil
1 litre chicken stock
50g dried harissa
150ml Olive Oil
250ml water
1 cup loosely packed flat leaf parsley
1 spanish onion, roughly diced

What to do:

Mix about 100ml olive oil with the harissa, and the juice and zest from two lemons. Chop what is left of these lemons and scatter them over the base of a deep roasting pan. Rub the harissa mix over the skin, place the lamb on top of the sliced lemon and leave to absorb the flavours for around 3 hours. It's winter here, so I left it covered, on my bench top, but if you're cooking somwhere hot, refrigerate it for 2 hours then remove for 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 150'c. Pour 250ml cold water into the base of the pan. Cover with foil. Roast for 3 hours, then turn the temp down to 120'c and continue to roast for 3 - 4 hours.

Ok, for the crushed chickpea side dish, strain and rinse the chickpeas, then add them to a deep saucepan with the litre of chicken stock. Simmer for 30 minutes. Ladle out 1 cup of stock, and then strain the chickpeas. Add them and the reserved stock to a food processor and "pulse" for a few seconds until they are slightly mashed.

Fry off the onion in a little oil. Add the chickpeas and parsley, and the juice from the final lemon. Drizzle with remaining olive oil before serving. Season with salt and pepper.

When this is done, the meat will literally fall from the bone. It is the most tender and succulent way to roast meat that I've ever tried. I can't wait to attempt this with pork belly, and I'm also going to try using red wine or ale instead of water.

Will I make this again? Oh, yes. I am going to be making this as often as time permits!!