Recipes

The little T-bones of lamb, done exactly the way the Sunday table remembers

Loin chops, peas, mash and a jug of proper mint sauce — some dinners don't need reinventing. Loin chops are the little T-bones of lamb: a nugget of loin one side of the bone, a scrap of tenderloin on the other, and they cook faster than the potatoes do. And real mint sauce isn't a project — it's chopped mint, sugar and vinegar stirred together in five minutes, and it runs rings around anything from a jar. Twenty-eight minutes, start to plate, and most of that is the spuds.

Proper patates lemonates — the potatoes that make the lamb wait its turn

Every Greek family table has them: potatoes roasted low and slow in lemon juice, olive oil, oregano and stock until they're soft all the way through, golden at the edges and soaked in flavour to the middle. They're not a side so much as the main event's equal partner. While they do their long, patient work in the oven, the loin chops take a quick lemon-oregano toss and a few fierce minutes in a grill pan — bronzed outside, pink at the bone, perched on top at the end. It's the Greek Sunday pairing, scaled honestly to the four-pack in your share.

A whole summer dinner off one grill, in the time it takes the zucchini to char

This is the dinner for those long evenings when the kitchen's too hot to stand in and the barbecue's already warm from habit. Loin chops love fierce heat — a few minutes a side and they're bronzed outside, pink at the bone. The zucchini chars right beside them, drinking up lemon and oregano, and a crumble of feta and a few torn mint leaves finish the job. One hotplate, one platter, twenty-five minutes. The hardest part is convincing everyone to wait while the chops rest.