A mammoth undertaking

After completely abdicating on the cooking front on Friday, and having left-over Chinese takeaway for Saturday lunch, I thought I’d better make an effort for Saturday dinner. That always used to be our big meal of the week, when Christopher cooked something special which required more effort than mId-week. It’s a tradition I’ve tried to keep up, and has really required me to sharpen up my cooking skills.

So on Saturday evening I decided to cook myself pomegranate lamb, from a Moroccan recipe. It’s basically a casserole of lamb, onions, garlic, ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon, all cooked slowly in pomegranate juice, then finished with Greek yoghurt to make a creamy sauce, and topped with fresh pomegranate seeds. It was absolutely delicious. But the difficult bit was the pomegranate. I couldn’t find any straight pomegranate juice in the supermarket, it was all adulterated with something else. So I picked a really heavy pomegranate fruit and decided to make it from fresh. Well, it was exceptionally difficult! When I squeezed it, the juice went absolutely everywhere! All over the worktop, onto the splash-back tiles on the wall (very well named in this case), over the floor (thank goodness we replaced the carpet tiles with wipe-clean vinyl) and even all over the toaster! And the juice is bright red, so it looked like there was blood everywhere. I thought I’d done a good job cleaning it up while the casserole was cooking, but kept finding more splashes even at breakfast the next day…….