Weekend cooking: Lamb shawarma

One of the things I love about cooking is that if great combinations are used, some of the best food is more assembly than alchemy. With these kinds of dishes, the stuff that needs to be done is more mechanical than anything else – chopping, reducing, marinating – but the end result is no less delicious.

But as it is in all enduring relationships, great chemistry is essential. Imagine chipper chips without salt and vinegar, meringues without cream, toast without butter. See what I mean? When the chemistry is right, even minimal effort can yield delicious results.

If minimal effort is maybe all you feel like giving, there are few things as forgiving as a slow-roasted joint of something or other. A couple of minutes’ prep and a long spell in the oven at low temperatures can turn even the gnarliest cut of meat into something melting and moreish.

So, for the first of this week’s recipes for the leisurely cook, I settled on a lamb shawarma made using shoulder of lamb, though you could just as easily use a leg; the meat just needs to be on the bone, and of course, shoulder is much less expensive and, to my mind, just as delicious.

To make this dish, the lamb covered with a thick paste made from onions, garlic and the classic north African spice blend Ras al hanout, with its fragrant notes of cinammon, cloves, cumin and a dozen other spices.

The lamb then gets plonked on a bed of thickly sliced onions, and the roasting dish half-filled with water before being consigned to the oven for between three and five hours – just the right amount of time to read the papers of a Sunday.

And don’t get cranky that I’m not being more specific ... Lamb at this time of the year can be awfully hard to figure out in the toughness stakes. Sometimes it’s meltingly tender after three hours, other times it needs double the cooking time.

Just keep topping it up with water, keep it covered with foil and eventually it will feel as though with one litttle tug, it’s all yours.

And while it is cooking, you can prepare the side dish – a purple cabbage salad. Use the grater on your food precessor to finely shred the cabbage, then season it well with salt and let it wilt for 10 minutes, before tossing with the rest of the ingredients.

I’m trying to make this salad at least once a week, as cabbage will apparently protect you from every possible health goblin, and cabbage juice (apparently even better for you) is just a step too far.