Lamb Soup with Roast Vegetables

Monday April 28

Barbara is officially the Queen of Broth, so yesterday, in the intervals of gardening, she made soup out of the lamb bone from Saturday's roast. She browned it and some chopped carrots, celery, and onions (in oil) in the oven for about a half hour, then covered them all with water and set them on the stove at the very lowest simmer for three hours or so. That gets all the good out of them, and throws off little or no scum. You can also put in extra vegetables as it simmers, in this case, chopped parsnips.

Once the soup was done and had cooled, she fished out the bone, picked all the meat off it, returned the meat to the pot, and put the whole pot in the fridge. Any extra fat congeals on the top and you can remove it, though in fact there was little fat on this at all.

So the next day, when the walk home was cold and rainy, we could just heave the pot onto the stove, throw in the leftover roast vegetables from Saturday's lamb roast, and have a delicious meal of hot soup.