Recipes

Bone-in curry, the way Indian home kitchens have always made it

Ask an Indian home cook why they leave the bone in a curry and you'll get a look that says the question answers itself. The bone is the flavour. Forequarter chops simmered whole give this gravy a depth that boneless cubes never quite reach, the potatoes stretch four chops into a generous dinner, and every spice on the list comes from an ordinary supermarket shelf. It needs a couple of hours of gentle burbling, most of them unattended, and it repays you with a pot that tastes even better tomorrow.

One blitzed sauce that transforms the whole pack

Chermoula is the Maghreb's answer to pesto — coriander and parsley blitzed with garlic, cumin, paprika, lemon and olive oil into a sauce that's green, punchy and slightly rough around the edges, exactly as it should be. North African cooks slather it on fish, but it might love lamb even more. Here it works twice: a third goes on the cutlets as a marinade, the rest waits in the bowl to be spooned over the seared meat like a trophy. One blender, one pan, fifty minutes — and a four-pack of cutlets turned into something you'd order twice.

The one-pan curry Indian home cooks make without thinking — now yours too

Every food culture has a mince dinner it runs on. Italy has bolognese, we have savoury mince, and across India it's keema — spiced mince simmered with tomato and peas until the whole thing turns rich and glossy. There's no chopping marathon and no secret technique here. Just an onion cooked properly golden, pantry spices, and twenty minutes of gentle simmering while you set the table. It's one pan, it's better tomorrow, and one 480g pack feeds four over basmati with room for seconds.

One tray, four chops, no decisions

The trick to a tray bake with a quick-cooking chop is simple: the potatoes get a head start. Twenty-five minutes alone in a hot oven with rosemary, garlic and olive oil, and then the loin chops land on top for the final blast — long enough to brown, short enough to stay pink at the bone, dripping their lamb fat over the spuds as they go. There's a roasted lemon in there for squeezing, one tray to wash, and the sort of quiet at the table that tells you it worked.

One tray, four chops, and potatoes cooked in lamb fat

Some dinners are good because of what you do to them. This one's good because of what you don't. Potatoes and red onion get a head start in a hot oven, then the forequarter chops go on top and do the rest of the work for you — as they roast, their fat drips down and turns the potatoes underneath into the best version of themselves. One tray, no decisions, and the washing-up is a chopping board and a fork. It's the dinner we cook when the day has already taken everything else out of us.

Sweet earth, salty cheese, pink lamb — the cafe plate you can do at home

There's a reason every good cafe has run some version of this plate: beetroot's sweetness and feta's salt were made to argue over lamb, and the lamb wins every time. This is a composed dinner rather than a toss-everything salad — wedges of beetroot roasted until their edges caramelise, a sharp honey-vinegar dressing, rocket, walnuts, and four charred cutlets propped on top. Most of the hour is the beetroot quietly roasting while you do something else. It turns one pack of cutlets into a dinner for two that looks like you ordered it.

The market-stall queue-maker, from your own frying pan

If you've ever stood twenty deep in the queue at a show or a Saturday market while gozleme got rolled and flipped on a hot plate, you already know why this recipe exists. Here's the good news: the dough is just flour, yoghurt and salt — no yeast, nothing trickier than a half-hour rest — and the filling is spiced lamb mince, wilted spinach and creamy feta. Roll it thin, fold it over, and cook until blistered and gold. Squeeze lemon over the top, cut into wedges, and listen for the crunch.

Heat on one side of the plate, cool on the other — the oldest trick in North Africa

Two condiments. That's the entire distance between plain grilled chops and something people ask about. Harissa — the smoky North African chilli paste that lives in the supermarket's international aisle these days — gets twenty minutes to work into the lamb before the grill pan does its thing. And on the other side of the plate, yoghurt stirred through with mint and lemon, there to catch the heat the moment it lands. Loin chops carry a spice crust better than any other chop, and the whole dinner is on the table in forty minutes.

Rome's burn-your-fingers cutlets — eaten too hot to hold, on purpose

Scottadito means "finger-burner", and Roman trattorias have never apologised for it. The dish is a dare as much as a recipe: cutlets marinated in olive oil, lemon and rosemary, grilled hard until blistered, and eaten straight off the grill with your hands while they're genuinely too hot to hold comfortably. No cutlery, no ceremony, plenty of napkins. It's lamb at its most joyful — and at home it's an hour of marinating, ten minutes of fierce heat, and four bones picked absolutely clean. Feeds two, though nobody's ever accused it of being polite.