It's all in the game: Slow roasted shoulder of hoggat and a nice Sundays drive in the sun.

It was a visit to my Turkish butcher (ess) that turned me in this direction, I had originally gone in to get some boned chicken thighs for our evening meal (Linda was coming down from Kiel), I saw that she had some nice looking hoggat shoulder (here most of the meat is either hoggat or mutton and Lamb must normally be ordered (except in the grill season when there are piles of chops and cutlets ready to be BBQ'd). I had also got a bag of sheep bones to make a nice stock for the finished sauce.

Bones ready to be boiled together with freeze dried veg a bit of garlic and a litre of vegetable stock. This was all prepared and strained through a seive ready to add to the sauce that the roast had been cooked over.

I bought a nice shoulder and as she had 5 kidneys (not herself but to sell from the counter) I took them as well. (I decided to do a trial for the comings weekends Kikoklu Tapas evening.

I wanted to do it real slow, cooked in my blue Aldi cast iron casserole, with loads of vegetables, herbs and spices.

I first cut the haxe (shank) off, this would be used to rest the main shoulder on.

I done the normal spiking with garlic, rosemary and anchovies, rubbed it all over with sea salt and cracked black pepper. .

Diced up a carrot, a piece of celeriac, some scallions, a couple of small onionss. I added these with a bit of speck and a couple of table spoons of neutral oil. I fried these until the onions became translucent and the speck took on a bit of colour. I

popped in a few fresh herbs (rosemary, sage, thyme and origano) put a load more dried herbs de Provence on top of the leg.

Drizzled the shoulder with a bit of olive oil, poured a good 1/4 bottle of Pinot Grigio and popped into the oven at 150°C

and went out for a drive in the smashing spring sun. We drove through the fields and back roads where I shoot, these where full of game and wild life, the trees are just taking on their first green sheen, the colour just prior to bursting into leaf, in fact the hedgerows are full of the bright yellow of forsythia and the willows hanging with catkins throwing their dusty pollen into the air to cause mayhem to all hay fever sufferers, that in this case is ME

When we returned, the flat was smelling of that smashing Sunday roast smell, that I remember from my young days at home, I had prepared all of the vegetables before going out so it was just a matter of putting on the cauli, spuds, beans and carrots, straining the liquor from the Aldi blue, adding some of the stock prepared earlier and reducing to a nice gravy, I do not like gloopy sauces.

In the mean time I made a sauce for the cauliflower, I made a flour, butter roux, adding the remainder of the stock, I diced up some blue French cheese and added this. Poured it over cauliflower, a couple of scrapings of nutmeg, a small handful of Parmasan and popped it into the oven to brown.