Roast leg of lamb with aubergines and onions

To me, a roast leg of lamb suggests a feast, a celebration, a reunion, a family party. I don't buy a leg of lamb for the two of us - when we eat lamb we usually choose shoulder or shanks and slow-cook them in one form or another (Simon is particularly partial to the slow-cooked shoulder in Jamie's Dinners, followed by shepherds pie the next night; we also, as I have said somewhere before, went through a prolonged obsessive phase of cooking shanks Gordon Ramsay-style). Jamie's Italian recipe for leg of lamb with aubergines and onions might thus have had to wait to be tried out, except that Simon's godfather and his wife came to stay and we haven't seen much of them recently (they now live in the south of France, which should be a good enough reason to visit..) and it seemed like a celebratory occasion to try out the leg of lamb. I love aubergines - they look sexy, they have a lovely name (sorry, but eggplant doesn't have the same appeal - whereas zucchini sounds more exciting than courgette) and they absorb flavours beautifully. This recipe appealed because it sounded tasty, celebratory but relatively straightforward - served with bread and salad rather than the usual British round of vegetables that can really tip me over the edge in the kitchen just before serving up dinner.

To cook the dish, I roasted the lamb for half an hour in a hot oven, before removing it and tipping off the fat. I scattered chunks of aubergine and red onion seasoned with salt, pepper and oregano and tossed in olive oil around the lamb and returned to the oven to cook for another hour.

While this was cooking, I made the tomato sauce. I fried garlic and chopped parsley stalks (as an aside, I have noticed that in this book Jamie makes good use of the stalks of various herbs - basil, for instance, as well as parsley, as the base for sauces) and then added tinned plum tomatoes, pinch of seasoning, a 'good swig' of red wine vinegar dried chilli and drained anchovy fillets (again, Jamie uses a lot of anchovy fillets - fussy eaters need not be wary, as they disintegrate into the sauce and lend it flavour); the sauce then simmered for 30 minutes.

When the lamb was cooked, I removed it from the baking tray to rest on a plate. I poured the tomato sauce over the roasted aubergines and onions and put the tray over a medium-heat hob, scraping away at the sticky bits at the bottom of the pan as best I could without mashing the vegetables up. I added parsley leaves and simmered gently until the sauce reached the desired consistency (which is hard to describe, and which Jamie suggests be measured against the photograph in the book; you can sort of see it in my picture below).

The picture probably shows how tasty this was: a rich tomato sauce, aubergines, tender lamb - delicious. What I liked about it was that it felt like an unctious but kitchen table type supper, much more relaxed than the English roast (which is not to say that roast lamb with mint sauce isn't wonderful too).

I served it with warm bread and salad as suggested. For the bread part, I made rosemary and garlic focaccia which was lovely too - my first focaccia from scratch attempt and it worked. Hurrah - there is nothing like homemade bread to make me feel like Nigella.

This was a fun dinner to eat, tearing off bread and helping yourself to more mustardy salad (I tend to make salad dressing as I was taught to when I lived in France, very classically, but with a lot of mustard), which worked so well with the lamb and veggies. It was a very happy evening, eating and drinking and chattering, and the food was generous but informal. A perfect sort of evening, really. Oh and we rounded the meal up with Jamie's vanilla cheesecake, which I will report on later....