easter roast, Greek style

With the easter celebrations behind us, I thought what better occasion to finally start actually using this blog (this being my first post after creating the actual blog about a couple of months ago). 

Easter in Greece is a huge celebration and many traditions are attached to it both religious and non-religious. On Easter Sunday families and friends gather together and start roasting the lamb. And when I say lamb, I mean a WHOLE lamb (spit-roast). 

My memories of Easters passed are similar: Someone starts roasting the lamb at the break of dawn in the hope that the lamb will be ready by lunch time. Families and friends arrive in the morning and start chatting and taking it in turns spinning the lamb over the coal. Traditional Greek music plays in the background. The drinks soon come out and the yummy smells from the lamb start to make bellies grumble in anticipation. Lunch time comes around yet the lamb doesn't seem to be ready. People start picking at the crispy parts of the lamb, while consuming more drink. Soon people start to sing and dance in merriment. And then finally, sometime after 3 or 4 pm lo and behold! the lamb is ready! The carving begins! People gather putting the final touches together: tzatziki! salads! more drink! gather the kids! The food is ready! People have their egg competitions (another tradition, that I won't go into detail now), People sit, people start eating. And the merry atmosphere of food and drink and dance and laughter goes on till the evening...

I have not had the chance to enjoy these delights for 10 whole years. Somewhere along the line I decided I needed to learn how to cook lamb (all be it just a leg of lamb in my oven, but it would have to do) and gather my friends and share an element of this day with them. This year, in Brussels and on a strange miscalculation on Easter Monday, friends came over for our little feast. The sun was shining and we decided to pop open a bottle of bubbly and have it in our little terrace with a small starter I'd prepared while waiting for the lamb to cook (let's face it, if we didn't have to wait for the lamb something would be missing from this wonderful day)

 

Sunshine and friends.

Cherry tomatoes filled with home-made tapenade, mozarella and sprinkled with basil leaves:

For the tapenade: 

200gr pitted black olives

1 garlic clove

1 tbsp olive oil

a handful of basil leaves

Blend all the ingredients together and there you have it! Home made tapenade :)

For the cherry tomatoes construction:

Cut the top of the tomatoes off and scoop out most of the juice (you can keep the juices for pan tomata - I'll save that for another blog post). Fill the tomatoes with some tapenade, and top off with half of a mini mozarella ball. Sprinkle with fresh basil. This is a very nice and refreshing starter which I came up with the day before when I decided to do the tapenade, and it worked a treat.

After some waiting around and the correct amount of hunger the oven roasted lamb was ready, so we all moved indoors for the yumminess!

 

 

For the roast lamb:

Ingredients

Leg of lamb: I got about 2.5kg (2 pieces) for 6 people and it was almost completely gone!

Enough potatoes for them to be spread out on the tray and NOT pile up on each other (this was a tip my aunt Marianna gave me, and she was completely right! If the potatoes are too many then they won't go crispy)

Juice of 2-4 lemons

Quite a bit of garlic! (cloves cut into 2-3 thick slices)

And of course extra virgin olive oil

Start off by boiling the lamb for 1.5-2 hours. This is a tip from my grandmother, and it ensures that the meat will be nice and soft inside. When it is nearly done juice the lemons, cut the garlic and potatoes (I don't peal them but that's up to preference) and preheat the oven to around 200 degrees Celcius. Lay the lamb on a tray (if you have 2 pieces you might need 2 trays to make sure the potatoes are spread out) and then of course the potatoes and a few pieces of garlic. With a knife slit parts of the meat and stuff them with the pieces of garlic. Drizzle everything with 3-4 spoons of the water left over from the boiling of the meat, the lemon juice and some olive oil (I'm sorry I do everything by eye and don't have a set measurement for this recipe!). Sprinkle with some salt, pepper and oregano. Baste everything and put in the oven. After around 20-30 minutes turn the lamb around, baste it with the juices and return to the oven. It will be ready when the lamb and potatoes are crispy (I usually think it takes around 1 hour in total, but then again I always seem to make people wait a little longer, believe me the crispyness is worth the wait!). Oh and another handy tip from my aunt: don't stir  or baste the potatoes at any point! Otherwise they might turn out soggy, and who wants that??

Serve with tzatziki and salad and tuck in!

I think I'm going to end the first blog post here as it's quite long already. Hope you enjoyed it and come back for more :)

Acknowledgements:

There was one casualty in the celebrations of the day... A suicidal easter chic decided to drown its sorrows and itself in Hylke's wine. We managed to rescue it as it started to drown in what we perceived to be slow motion. It rejoined its colourful friends and life was worth living again for this little fella