I dreamt one night that our supermarket had an assortment of legs of lamb for sale. Sure enough, when we did our shopping that day, there they were, frozen as it was still weeks before Christmas. I snatched one up.

I cooked it on Christmas Eve, when friends were coming over for hot tubbing, drinks, and dinner. What with the hot tub and the visiting over drinks, there was some flexibility about when we would eat. I figured the earliest would be around 4 PM, but I was glad we ended up eating about 5:30 PM. I think the leg of lamb benefited from the extra time in the oven.

I put the 4.5 pound package of meat on the kitchen counter around 10 AM, to begin warming up. Since garlic and lamb are heavenly together, I peeled several heads of garlic from our garden harvest and sliced them into wedges:

To get this shot, I had to enlist my husband Kelly, since both my hands were in use. The lamb was now sitting in our Dutch oven and I was poking holes in it and pushing the garlic slices in. There were about a dozen.

Next, I rubbed the top of the meat with salt, pepper, paprika, and my favorite Penzey lamb seasoning, a mixture of quite a few things. Some of the recipes I read said to rub the whole leg of lamb but in keeping with my simple style, I just did the top.

I drizzed olive oil over all that and rubbed it in with my fingers, then poured in a cup of beef broth I happened to have, along with a cup of white wine. Two cups turned out to be about perfect; they could have been anything, even water. I was careful not to pour them over the meat, though, not wanting to remove the coating. Then at 11 AM it went into the oven at 275 degrees F, the temperature it would stay at for hours. After about half an hour, I put the lid on the pot.

A few hours later, I added some peeled and sliced carrots from our garden, into the bubbling liquid.

It all came out of the  oven just before 5:30 PM, so it had almost 6 and a half hours to turn into the tender, delicious, fall-apart-tender main course. Hey, it’s also suitable for posting on Pinterest!

Speaking of Pinterest, that is where I went to find a leg of lamb recipe.

I used this one as my main inspiration, but skipped the lemons as the ones we had in the house were destined for our Margaritas. Here is what I printed out from that one. And I got the idea of using my Dutch oven here. There were a number of other good lamb ideas there too. Now I’m hoping that our grocery store will have some leftover legs of lamb on sale…