Food and Drink: Bon Appetit's Roasted Leg of Lamb with Yukon Gold Potatoes

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This was a huge first for CasaCullen's culinary curiosity. We've never cooked lamb before so we dove into THIS recipe, head first. I was laying on the couch a few night's ago diligently catching up on my growing stack of magazines of all sorts (fashion, home design and cooking) and I decided to glance through Bon Appetit's February issue for some inspiration for this week's dinner menus. It was late and I didn't feel like reading anymore captivating stories in the new Vanity Fair Hollywood issue (I highlighted it's controversial cover on my fashion blog HERE) so that seemed like a perfect fit.

Much to my delight, I landed right on this recipe and got to thinking, 'I can do this!' I told hubby to get excited because he was up for a special dinner treat this week. He smiled from ear to ear. Roasted leg of lamb and yukon gold potatoes are quite the rarity around CasaCullen so we were ready for a challenge and a treat.

I chatted with the butcher at my local grocery store and told him exactly the cut of lamb I was looking for and kindly asked him to remove the majority of the excess fat. Hubby pointed out that the price of our meat, post fat trim, actually went down almost $6. This was a huge piece of meat so I was nervous and did not want to waste all that money for a sub-par job. Not to worry, it turned out great.

My favorite part of the entire recipe was learning how long and deep you need to cut shallow slits on the surface of the lamb for the paste to penetrate. For some reason, that ribbed texture made the final product look uber fancy and fabulous. It just made me feel like a proud mother, ha! Other than that, we used our Oregon Scientific thermometer and didn't quite cook it long enough. We shaved off enough for our first dinner and while eating that we put the meat back in for a bit longer. That did the trick!

The leftovers, as you see above, were made into yummy gyros. Via THIS RECIPE over at Chef Maven, I also had another first this week in making my own homemade tzatziki. Readers, oh my gosh, was that ever worth it. First of all, we have tons now and have used it as a crudités dip and are doing round two of gyros tonight. So definitely give that a try if it's something you love to eat at restaurants and have never ventured to make.

Enjoy this lovely readers and I hope this post inspires you to try something new, enticing and even a tad bit out of your comfort zone in your kitchen this week. We love that we get to use our teamwork to a greater degree when trying such a big, detailed and rather fancy new recipe. I never really knew cooking together could be so fun! And, oh my gosh, I nearly forgot. Look who tweeted back to us about trying out this scrumptious recipe. Yes readers, this absolutely MADE OUR NIGHT! A tweet from the magazine...you know we were all smiles and cheer!

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