This dish is not Genovese sauce but it is inspired by those simple flavours, and a lot more filling.

Ingredients
1 tbs olive oil
2 chicken breast fillets
10 medium-sized mushrooms (Swiss browns are good)
½ cup pesto
1 cup cream, marscarpone or crème fraiche

Method

Cut the chicken into small pieces and fry in olive oil on medium heat until golden.

Slice the mushrooms and add to the pan. Mix through until coated with pan juices and starting to cook through.

Reduce the heat to low, and stir the pesto through. Heat through until fragrant.

Add the cream and bring to a simmer. Stir until thickened, leaving enough liquid to coat freshly cooked pasta.

 Bellissimo!

Growing up, every Sunday involved a roast. One very fond memory I have is roast lamb with mint sauce. Nana used to send me out into the backyard to pick the mint fresh from the garden. And it was nice as a kid to be included in the cooking process in some small way.

Jim was feeling particularly inspired by Maggie Beer’s saltbush mutton recipe. It’s fairly simple to prepare but you need a long cooking time so it’s perfect for a lazy Sunday at home. We opted to cook with a leg of lamb instead of the much fattier mutton. Because we have an uneven fan-forced oven, we also had to adjust Maggie’s cooking temperature so the meat didn’t dry out.

Roast lamb
Start with a leg of lamb, cut some slits into the meat and insert garlic slices and rosemary sprigs, pour 125ml of warmed port over it, then cover it and roast in the oven at around 140°C for two hours. The meat must be basted with pan juices every 30 minutes to stop it from burning or drying out. After two hours, pour another 125ml of port over the leg of lamb and continue cooking uncovered in the same way for another two hours. Before carving the meat, rest the lamb for at least 20 minutes.

We served this with a selection of roast vegetables that we love.

Roast vegetables
2 medium potatoes
A thick wedge of pumpkin
1 sweet potato
3 small beetroots
Rosemary

Cut the vegetables into roughly even pieces (around 4cm) and sprinkle with fresh rosemary sprigs. Toss with olive oil and a couple of tablespoons of butter, and bake, turning once or twice, until they’re golden and crunchy on the outside but soft on the inside (about an hour).

It’s worthwhile cooking the beetroot in a separate dish, or at one end of your baking dish, because otherwise it discolours all the other vegetables when you’re turning them.

Parsnips, carrots, onions and garlic are also wonderful roasted. Roasted garlic is particularly useful if you intend to make a jus or gravy with the meat juices from the pan.

While the lamb is resting, make the delightful mint sauce, just like Nana used to make.

Mint sauce
4 tbs fresh mint leaves
2 tbs caster sugar
2 tbs boiling water
8 tbs white vinegar

Finely chop the mint and place in a small bowl. Sprinkle with the sugar and pour in the water. Stir once to mix and allow it to stand until the water is cool. Add the vinegar and mix well. Spoon this over your sliced meat at the table.

The meal was delicious! The lamb was delicately flavoured by the rosemary and garlic; any fat on it had melted away. The meat simply fell off the bone after cooking for that long but was still beautifully moist and tender. The mint sauce added a semi-sweet zingy quality, which was quite refreshing on the palate. And the rich flavour of the vegetables complemented it all well.

Now…what to do with all that leftover roast meat…