I want to quickly share a recipe D cooked which made another dent in our bulging bin bag of wild garlic – a boned shoulder of lamb stuffed with the neverending leaves, crushed seaweed, lemon zest and pine nuts.

I’ve become more interested in cooking with seaweed since I wrote an article for Great British Food magazine about it recently. It adds a lovely umami seasoning to lamb in particular and this recipe is a stunner – soft roast meat with a powerful filling which works well with potatoes, flatbreads or a grain like bulgur wheat on the side.

Shoulder of Lamb Stuffed with Wild Garlic, Seaweed and Pine Nuts Recipe

1.8kg shoulder of lamb (or thereabouts) – this is the weight with bone-in. Ask your butcher to bone it so it will lay flat on a surface and be rolled up again once stuffed.

For the stuffing 

20g dried seaweed (we used wakame stems)
100g pine nuts
1 tablespoon sea salt flakes
1 tablespoon Urfa chilli flakes
Zest of 1 lemon
200g wild garlic washed and checked thoroughly for critters
2 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat the oven to 180C.

Pulse all the stuffing ingredients together in a blender until you have a rough paste.

Place the lamb skin side down and smear the filling liberally across the meat. Roll it and tie it up with string, for roasting. There are proper methods for tieing it but we just made it work.

Put the lamb into a roasting tray, rub the skin with a bit of olive oil then sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper.

Roast for one and a half hours or until it reaches an internal temperature of around 60C. If you want to crisp the skin further, finish under a hot grill for around 3-4 minutes (watching carefully).

This is the second of four recipes I created in partnership with Vitamix and Great British Chefs (that means they paid me to write ’em). 

I’ve been trying to think of something to say about these beef ribs other than that they taste really good and I can’t, really, because it’s Friday and my brain is frazzled. What do British people do when they don’t know what to say? They talk about the weather. So I’m going to say that these are perfect for the barbecue now it’s cooled down a bit, and we can all contemplate actually standing in front of a metal bucket full of hot coals. I’m very glad to see the back of that heat, quite frankly, and until we get air con you can keep your 30 degrees + thanks very much. There, that’ll do, won’t it?

Oh yes, I should say that this is a fantastic rub made by whizzing coffee beans and chipotle chillies together in the Vitamix. The idea here, apart from the fact that it tastes brilliant, is to show you that the Vitamix will blend up pretty much anything, including those notoriously hard to grind beanz.

This results in a smoky, sweet and spicy bark that’s different enough to make people ask you for the recipe. You could easily serve these as tacos with sour cream, some pink pickled onions, hot sauce, black beans and so on. Think something hot, something creamy, something spicy, something crunchy and fragrant, then yer meat = TOP TACO.

Coffee and Chipotle Rubbed Barbecue Short Ribs Recipe

1 rack of beef short ribs
2 tablespoons coffee beans
1 handful of dried chipotle chillies
1 tbsp of dark brown sugar
1 tbsp of salt
2 teaspoons cumin seeds

Add the coffee beans, chillies and cumin seeds to the Vitamix and pulse on Variable 5 until you have a medium to coarse spice rub consistency

Rub the paste all over the ribs and leave to marinate 24 hours (this is an important length of time, do not reduce it because it will affect the final texture and moisture of meat)

When ready to cook, remove the tough membrane from the ribs (the meat-side, not the bone-side), and cook at around 105°C on offset heat in a barbecue or smoker. The length of time will depend on the thickness of the ribs and could take 5–8 hours.