Greek salad in your lamb casserole

When a recipe calls for cooking red meat with ingredients that make Greek salad Greek salad, then I raise my eyebrows, fold my arms, throw my hip sideways and say “humph”! I am beginning to realise though that there is a whole world of flavour out there that I have had my mind too shackled by conventions to explore. This recipe escapade that Son and I have embarked on is an adventure that will change the way we see food and cooking forever.

Tonights recipe called for cooking lamb cutlets in a mixture of red wine, rosemary, olives and feta. The cutlets are browned and then these ingredients are mixed, tossed over the cutlets and the whole lot is baked. Because we are ovenless, we covered the casserole and cooked it on the stove at a moderate heat. Now red wine and rosemary are easy to understand in a casserole, but olives and feta?

What happens is that the feta melts into the sauce to make it thick and creamy and yummalicious beyond BBC celebrity chef gastronomic ecstacy. The olives are warm and soft and burst into flavour between your teeth, with more of the flavour volatiles escaping because of the heat than you would taste when eating olives at room temperature. Awesome! The flavours conjure up images of white washed villages with blue and turquoise shutters and tiles next to the azure seas of the Mediterranean with bouzouki music and the fresh salty air of the sea.

We served the cutlets and sauce on a bed of rice and lentils which soaked up the sauce to provide heavenly mouthfuls of pure red wine sauce delight after the cutlets are devoured! We also had some steamed broccoli, cauliflower and beans mixed together as conscience food.

I have one regret. I bought the cutlets off the shelf at Spar. Next time I make this dish I will go to the butcher and have thicker lamb cutlets specially cut. I will also de-pip the olives although Son and I have fun spitting the pips, something we only do at home and when we don’t have guests. Son scored the dish at 9/10 and said the sauce may have had just a little too much feta in it. He also commented on the difference between using rosemary freshly picked from the garden minutes before it is used and that out of a bottle. There is just no comparison, the fresh stuff is just superior.

While packing the dishwasher, son licked every last morsel of sauce from the casserole. I suggested a slice of bread, and he said “No, this is just perfect”, straight of the finger!