Food "interlood" — slow-cooked lamb

I cooked a leg of lamb over the weekend. It was and is un gigot de douze heures — I cooked it for 12 hours or a little more in the slow-cooker. I've seen recipes for slow-cooked lamb that call for roasting the leg for either five or seven hours. Nowadays, with slow-cookers a.k.a. crock pots, the lamb can cook at very low temperature for 12 hours.

 The lamb leg just barely fit in the slow-cooker. It weighed 3+ kg (7 lbs.) and simmered with:

• 2 cut-up carrots

• 2 sliced onions

• 3 chopped garlic cloves

• 2 sliced celery branches

• ½ bottle of white wine

• 2 Tbsp. tomato paste

• 2 Tbsp. dried thyme

• 2 bay leaves

• 1 tsp. red pepper flakes

• 1 tsp. ground allspice

• salt and black pepper

To cook the gigot, on Saturday night I set the cooker's temperature to low and its timer for 10 hours. And when I got up Sunday morning, I checked the lamb's temperature. It was at 190ºF or slightly higher (90ºC). At that point, the meat is starting to fall off the bone and is perfectly tender. I took it out of the slow-cooker, put it in a roasting dish, and set it in the refrigerator. At noontime, I reheated it for a hour or so in a slow oven.

It is pretty tasty too. There was a good amount of liquid — more than half a liter — in the pot, and a good bit of rendered lamb fat too. I de-greased the broth using a gravy separator and served the lamb with that flavorful broth and the onions, carrots, and celery that cooked in the crock pot with it, along with some pale-green flageolet beans out of a jar and some home-grown Tuscan "dinosaur" kale out of the freezer. Lamb is always good with beans, be they pale green, red, or white. And beans are always good with greens.

We had slow-cooked lamb for our Sunday dinner but, as you can imagine, we have quite a bit left over. This week, I think I might cook a dish of moussaka with eggplant, tomato-and-chopped-lamb sauce, grated cheese, and béchamel. And I plan to "pull" (shred, effilocher) some of the lamb and season it with barbecue sauce for sandwiches served with cole slaw. It will be good in Mexican-style tacos or enchiladas too, seasoned with ground cumin and chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. Some of the cooked lamb can go into the freezer for future meals.