Just a wee post tonight as I’m itching to find out what happened to Lucy Beale, god help me. I’m ashamed of myself.

I heard Boy George on the radio driving back and it nudged a memory out of me – I once threw my sister’s Culture Club CD down a well (apparently I lived in Amish country)– frankly the best place for it, but I got a proper telling off for it. But see now she used to do the same thing that Paul does now – hears a song, likes it, plays it over and over and over and over again. Not too bad when it’s a decent ditty but Karma fucking Chameleon? Even now the opening chords of that song transport me right back to my teenage years in a bedroom that smelled slightly of bleach and Boy bloody George caterwauling through the floorboards.

I grew up in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, Northumberland – the type of village where a minority of the locals still pointed at planes in the sky, mouthing the word dragons with spittle on their lips. It didn’t have a corner shop (and still doesn’t) but it did have two pubs and a kitchen and bathroom centre. You couldn’t buy a pint of milk but you could buy a fabulous bespoke oak cabinet to store it in. It was a pleasant enough place to live but definitely somewhere you’d go to die rather than thrive.

My sister and I, and the other children of the village (or corn), spent most of our time building dens and treehouses. Well, I’d watch them build treehouses, I was always too fat to climb a tree and the one time I did I got stuck up there for several hours before promptly falling out, like a sleepy owl dressed in a knock-off Diadora tracksuit. Looking back, our dens were amazingly creative – a stack of pallets hidden up a tree, a stack of pallets hidden in the woods, a stack of pallets hidden amongst the pallets on the building site when they built the new houses. We lit a fire once inside one of these enclosed dens which has to be the height of stupidity, but filled with the childlike sense of invincibility we carried on, and mind it gets worse – we used a tyre as a make-shift fire-pit. How the hell we survived that I have no clue – nothing says good country living like breathing in smoke and the fumes from a singeing tyre. Perhaps we’ll be able to launch a criminal case against Dunlop in years to come for all of our defects but frankly, I don’t have Julia Robert’s three-cock-gob so I’d make a shite Erin Brockovitch.

Tell you what I can get in my gob though – tonight’s tea. Rosemary crusted lamb steaks with broccoli and pepper mash.

to make rosemary crusted lamb steaks you will need:

four decent lamb steaks, fat removed – better to buy two excellent chops than four scrag-end slippers, 50g of fresh parsley, 2tbsp of fresh rosemary leaves/sprigs/fingers, who knows, one clove of garlic, 2 tbsp of grated parmesan (between four is a tiny amount, but I’d be careful and say 2 syns), 4 tsp of olive oil (again, between four, so only 2 syns each, and if you want to reduce that further, use two tsp for the crust and use frylight to oil the pan), 60g of breadcrumbs (between four, but I just whizzed up a breadbun which is one person’s healthy extra), salt, pepper and a beaten egg. Serve with pepper mash (mashed potato + egg + lots of pepper) and broccoli.

to make rosemary crusted lamb steaks you should:

hopefully you’ll have a mini-chopper – something like this will do – less than £15 and you can make healthy pesto, hummous and finely chop breadcrumbs in it. We use it a lot, but you can make do with a food processor. Chuck the parsley, rosemary, garlic, parmesan, olive oil (saving a little for the frying pan later) and breadcrumbs in there and blitz to make a pesto. Add some more breadcrubs to get it nice and crumbly.

Pop your beaten egg into one bowl and your pesto in other. Swish your lamb chop around in the egg and then in the pesto. Get your pan up to heat, the olive oil or frylight hot, and drop the chops in – two minutes or more on each side depending on how rare you like your lamb – I like mine to still be connected to its mother and with a half-formed baa on its lips when it gets turned into my dinner. Let them rest for 3-5 minutes (plate up your mash and sides) and enjoy!

The pesto might come away from the lamb, but so what? Just put it back on. This was delicious and only 4 syns max per chop, and that’s being VERY careful. I’d personally give it only two syns but I can’t be fussed arguing with someone over two syns!

Right! ENJOY. Share!

J