Quick lean lamb dishes

Press, 21 November 1987, Page 18

Quick lean lamb dishes

MAVIS AIREY

looks at the latest

effort to promote New Zealand lamb for contemporary cooks.

Boning Short Loins

The back end of a lamb loin is called the short loin. The fillet is the small muscle on one side of the bones. The boneless loin or strip loin is the bigger muscle on the other side of the bones. Boneless loins are very popular, especially in restaurants. You can prepare these yourself, in a few minutes, from untrimmed short loins.

Boning Loin Chops

The short loin may be cut into six loin chops, each with a small T-shaped bone. Noisettes are made by removing the T-bone and. outer fat from middle loin chops. They are held together by a thin strip of side bacon, by string, or by skewers.

How experienced W.D.F.F. cooks get their results

Alison Holst believes New Zealand has some of the best and most experienced lamb cooks in the world. She came to this conclusion after judging a nationwide competition for quick but nutritious ways to cook lean lamb. The contest was organised earlier this year by the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers and the New Zealand Meat Producers’ Board. It was part of a campaign to counter the negative image red meat has come to have in the health-conscious eighties. All recipes used only lean meat trimmed of all visible fat. Alison Holst was so impressed with the innovative ideas the amateur cooks came up with, she agreed to edit a book of the recipes, “Lambtastic,” which has just been released.

The book does not pretend to be a comprehensive lamb cookbook, but concentrates on dishes that can be quickly pre-

pared in a frypan- or microwave. The main cuts used are therefore chops, steaks, boneless loins and fillets, and other lean and tender cuts. Alison Holst has also added a step-by-step guide to boning and trimming — an important, prerequisite for short cooking time, she believes, and a skill amateurs can easily teach themselves. The book is clearly laid out, with colour photographs of the boning techniques and some of the dishes. It is a shame Alison Holst was not able to test all the recipes herself, but she seems ready to trust the skills of the competitors — it would have been nice to know from this book who they were, and which recipes in the book were the winning entries!

Lambtastic is available from W.D.F.F. offices and the public relations department of the New Zealand Meat Producers’ Board, Box 121, Wellington. The price is $l2, including GST.