Possibly the best roast lamb you'll ever eat

I fancy myself as a bit of a chef.

There. I said it. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t fancy the unsociable hours or undoubted stress of working in a professional kitchen, but I do like to try and do my best cooking for me and my wife, and especially relish the challenge of trying to cook up a masterpiece in the single electric oven in the tiny kitchen of our east London flat.

We had friends over last night – we didn’t strictly intend to, but had taken a trip to Borough Market and returned with a beautiful half shoulder of lamb from the Ginger Pig and an obscene quantity of ultra-fresh veg from Turnips. Our friends had been away for the weekend and I figured they wouldn’t fancy cooking so we timed the food to be ready for when they’d get back. Turns out it was a good plan: several bottles of good red wine later and the prospect of work the next day for three of us (I had the day off today) we ended the night agreeing it was a success.

Lamb is quite possibly my favourite Sunday roast meat – but, saying that, on the right day beef or pork cooked the right way could feasibly take that accolade. The bonus with lamb, and especially lamb shoulder, is that it’s so easy to cook and really difficult to get wrong. I’ve cooked this particular recipe several times and it produces delicious, fall-off-the-bone, melt-in-the mouth meat every single time. My mate reckoned it was quite possibly the best lamb he’d ever tasted. I’m sure he was being polite, but let’s put it this way: there are no leftovers for me to heat up today (which is a real shame because it’s probably even better the next day). So to share the love I thought I'd share my recipe. You're welcome.

Of course I wouldn't have thought to post this unless my friend had made such kind comments. I wouldn't dream of describing my own work with such unabashed praise. In the interests of balance I think it's only fair that I point out that my Yorkshire Puddings were appalling. They didn't rise at all and through too much time in the oven could have quite easily been used as a missile of some kind, so therefore I won't be publishing a recipe for them. The roast potatoes were good, though there's not really enough to making them to call it a "recipe". Perhaps one day.

Shoulder of lamb is a tough, sinewy, fatty joint. Almost every other part of the animal should be cooked in such a way that a good veterinarian could get it running round a field again in a matter of minutes. Shoulder (and of course shank) is different. To break down all the collagen and get that tender falling-apart texture it needs to be cooked long and slow. My inspiration for this recipe came from this excellent one of Jamie Oliver’s, but I found that the juices dried out and burnt in the bottom of the roasting dish, meaning I couldn’t make a gravy with them. I’m a garlic fiend, so I’ve upped the garlic, and whilst I may fancy myself as a chef, a gardener I ain’t – I’ve lost track of the number of rosemary plants I’ve tried and failed to keep alive, so the herbs are dried.

I can’t stress enough the importance of the quality of the meat. I’ve cooked this both with Ginger Pig and Tesco meat and it’s always twice as nice when I use meat that’s been prepared and hung properly, and not injected with water and goodness knows what. The Ginger Pig is a wonderful butchers with a couple of branches across London. The meat comes from their own farm in North Yorkshire, and I’ve never had a bad joint of meat from there. There is a difference in price – we paid about £12.50 per kilo for bone-in shoulder; Tesco charges £7. Half a shoulder (approx. 1 kg) easily fed four of us – so you’re looking at £1.40 extra per person. Well worth it, in my opinion, for extra enjoyment we got from the meal.

Other people I’ve cooked this for have asked whether you could cook this with leg of lamb. The recipe would work, but you shouldn’t do it. Leg of lamb is much more expensive than shoulder, and is naturally less fatty and more tender. It simply doesn’t need to be cooked for so long. It also won’t turn out as well – it’s the fat in the shoulder that keeps the meat so moist and the sinew and collagen that gives the shoulder so much more flavour – cooking this with leg of lamb won’t only be more expensive, it will be less tasty too. Take the cheaper route, and use shoulder, for best results.

And under no circumstances allow your butcher to remove the bone – this helps with heat exchange, moisture retention and adds flavour.

It’s all too tempting to use the bottle of plonk someone left behind at a party to cook with. Resist the urge. Never cook with anything you’re not willing to drink. I don’t know what makes people think that something unpalatable in a glass will somehow become delicious when cooked. If you’re going to invest in a decent joint of lamb, don’t for goodness’ sake ruin it by skimping on the wine. This recipe doesn’t call for much, and you can drink the rest with dinner. If you don’t drink alcohol, you can use lamb stock.

We served this as a Sunday roast with roasted herbed seasonal root veg, roasted garlic and roast potatoes. We also served Yorkshire Puddings which failed spectacularly, which my wife puts down to karma for serving them with the wrong meat.

Ingredients (serves 4)

·         One half-shoulder of lamb

·         One bulb of garlic

·         Rosemary

·         Mint sauce or jelly

·         Red wine

·         Water

·         Rapeseed oil

Preheat the oven to its highest possible temperature.

We used smoked garlic which I picked up on a recent trip to France. It’s difficult to find in the UK (it’s available at Borough Market) but standard white garlic works equally well. Because of the long cooking time, the full bulb doesn’t overpower the dish, but feel free to reduce it if this seems too much. Break the bulb into cloves and slice each clove into spears.

Put your lamb on a chopping board fat-side up. Score the fat in a criss-cross and stab the lamb all over with the point of your knife – on the bottom and sides too. Poke the spears of garlic into the holes you have just made.

Pour some oil into the base of a high-sided roasting dish just larger than your joint. Put the joint into the roasting pan and turn it over so it is fully covered. Sprinkle your joint with rosemary all over on both sides.

I find red wine can really overpower the flavour of the meat, so mix about half a wineglass full of wine with the same amount of water to prevent the lamb tasting exclusively of wine. Make this mixture, and add in a couple of teaspoonfuls of mint sauce. You could, of course, use fresh mint, but being no gardener I didn’t have any to hand. Mint sauce works well. Pour this around the meat (not over it).

Cover the meat tightly with foil to prevent moisture escaping. I did four layers. That might be a bit excessive, but be confident it’s adequately sealed. Put the meat in the oven and immediately turn the temperature down to 140°C. Leave it there for four hours.

Remove the meat from the oven and place on a chopping board. Cover with the foil and leave to rest for an hour. When you’re ready to serve, use two forks to pull the lamb apart.

Allow the fat in the roasting pan to solidify and remove it. If your kitchen is as hot as mine, you might need to put the roasting pan into the fridge (once cooled) to achieve this. The remaining juices/wine can be used to make the gravy. There’s no magic to this – pour it into a pan and, depending on the volume, add water. Add in lamb stock, mint and you’re ready to go.

It's not often I agree with Gerry Sutcliffe - but the BBC must stay in Bradford

I like the BBC.

I won’t pretend that the BBC is perfect – it certainly has its problems. An immensely complex management system, unnecessarily aggressive (and I suspect borderline legal) licence fee collection tactics, and Eastenders all count towards its problems.

But the BBC does produce some fantastic output. The editorial independence afforded to its programme makers is unparalleled – no other broadcaster in the world would allow one of its presenters to give its top dog the grilling that James Naughtie gave George Entwistle on Radio 4’s Today programme when he was appointed to Director-General. The coverage given to the BBC’s own failings in the Jimmy Savile affair wouldn’t have happened if it was ITV.

The BBC’s independence puts it, in my eyes, above any other broadcaster in the land. The licence fee is worth every penny for Radio 4 and Question Time alone. Everything else is a bonus.

Which is why I am so disappointed about the Corporation’s decision to close its Bradford studio. I actually want to support the BBC. I want it to work, and I want it to work as well as it does now. Closing one of its regional studios will bring it further away from its listeners – and the BBC simply can’t afford to be out of touch.

But this planned closure has further consequences. The National Media Museum, in which the Bradford studio is housed, is struggling against a 50% reduction in footfall over the past decade. The removal of this studio will deprive the Museum of a live, working exhibit. The closure of the BBC Bradford studio could be the nail in the coffin of this fabulous Bradford institution. The relationship isn’t just one way – the BBC benefits from a fantastic city centre location ideal for broadcasts based in Bradford and its surrounding district.

Bradford already suffers from negative media perception and underrepresentation. Moving the BBC out will necessarily and unavoidably amplify that. The damage will be irreparable. It’s bad enough that the BBC has named its West Yorkshire radio station after just one of the three cities in the county – leaving Bradford behind altogether just adds insult to injury.

This decision is a bad for the BBC and bad for Bradford. We must reverse it for both of their sakes.

What can I do?

Within ten minutes, you can help save the BBC, without even leaving your computer. Follow the below 3 point plan:

·         Contact your MP online using http://www.writetothem.com/ and tell them you want to keep the BBC in Bradford. This will send an email to your MP so you don’t even need a printer or a stamp!

·         Tell the BBC you’re unhappy. There’s a handy form at https://ssl.bbc.co.uk/complaints/forms/?reset=#anchor

·         Spread the word. Blog. Tweet. Talk. If you’re using Twitter, use the hashtag #BBCinBD

Lies, damn lies and statistics. Why I'm not taking OFSTED's league table seriously

The UK schools inspectorate, OFSTED, today published a league table of local authorities’ comparative performance in inspections.

I’ve always considered OFSTED’s methodology in assessing the effectiveness of schools to be deeply flawed. Schools get, or at least used to get, an obscene amount of notice that OFSTED were going to turn up. I vividly recall my secondary school spending what seemed like months preparing for an impending OFSTED visit – tidying classrooms, selecting pupils to be interviewed by the inspectors, prepping them on what they were and weren’t allowed to say, painting the walls, and even installing an electronic information board in the main corridor which, needless to say, was removed once the inspectors bade them farewell for another few years. But the inspectors’ findings have been used for years to compile school league tables forcing schools to compete against each other in vying for for the top spot and, in turn, parents’ business.

My secondary school cherished its OFSTED “Outstanding” rating more than any other prize, which made it a popular choice for parents in Bradford – the school was over four times oversubscribed for its 2012 intake – marginally better, from a probability-of-getting-in perspective, than the University of Cambridge (figures taken for 2010 as last year available). This fact was used to exert control over its student population – frequently we were reminded of the enormous privilege it was to attend and the scores of applicants we had deprived of a place, in order to maintain discipline and attendance – which wouldn’t perhaps have been so bad if the school employed the sibling rule and/or aligned its holiday calendar with the city’s other schools.

This element of control served two purposes. The first of these was that behavioural standards were high, as was the attendance rate – which is some mean feat when unfortunate parents with children in two different schools can’t plan holidays when all their children are out of term-time. Whether these ends justify the means is another question entirely – but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that being continually reminded of the fantastic privilege with which one has been honoured rather takes the shine off. And for that you can blame my year 8 English teacher for never teaching me the rule about ending sentences with prepositions.

 The second of these is that the OFSTED rating was maintained, which allowed the school to continue the cycle of control into the future. Thinking about it, another consequence was probably an increase in the differential in comparative OFSTED ratings between the school and neighbouring schools – holidays in term-time were forbidden, so parents with children in two schools probably took the other child out. From the school’s perspective, a virtuous circle.

It’s only natural that, once they know they will be tested, schools will pull out all the stops to ensure they attain the highest rating possible. Even schools that don’t seek to lord vague conceptions of “privilege” over their pupil populations will seek to attract applicants – and, of course, there’s the headteacher’s reputation at stake. No-one wants to be seen to be at the helm of a sinking ship. And school league tables arguably serve a valuable purpose in allowing parents to make an informed decision as to where to send their children – even if the underlying methodology could use some work.

What I cannot understand is what useful inferences we can draw from the local authority league table that OFSTED published today. Sure, it’s interesting to be able to ask why the worst-performing local authority, Coventry, only sends 42% of its children to “Good” or “Outstanding” schools when neighbouring Solihull – fourth in the league table – can send 77%. But it’s not as though the league table can actually promote competition between authorities in the same way that a schools league table can. People generally live in reasonably close proximity to their families – it’s not as though a family in Derby, unhappy with the 43% chance that their child has of attending a “Good” or “Outstanding” school can just up-sticks the hundred miles to Buckinghamshire where their chance will rise to 78%, leaving their entire support network behind.

What I think is more dangerous is the potential for misuse, or misinterpretation, of the information. Local authorities are huge areas – and there’s the potential that the combining of data in this way does more harm than good. In Wakefield – a local authority of some 131 square miles, OFSTED calculate that a child has a 52% chance of attending a “Good” or “Outstanding” school. Hop over the boundary into Kirklees, a district of a mere 158 square miles, and that figure jumps to 71%. This may tempt a concerned parent in Wakefield to apply for a place for their child out-of-district in Kirklees.

But these figures don’t give any meaningful insight into the performance of individual schools within an authority. Within each authority there will be enormous variation in terms of schools that underperform, schools that perform adequately and schools that excel. The OFSTED table shows only those schools in the “Good” or “Outstanding” category – more granular information is required to draw an informed conclusion. There are absolutely no grounds to infer that any one school in Kirklees is better than any other school in Wakefield – it’s perfectly possible that a Wakefield school just over the border from another one in Kirklees is the better one. Furthermore, no mention is made of what proportion of other grades there are within the authority. Which is better – an authority with 80% “Outstanding” and 20% “Special Measures” or one with 60% “Outstanding”, 20% “Good” and 20% “Satisfactory”?

The table could, in limited circumstances, be beneficial as a benchmark of the comparative performance of local education authorities. Or, at least, it could if the league table included only those schools within local authority control, but that isn’t what they have done. This league table includes all state schools within each local authority, including Free Schools, Academies and Technology Colleges, over which the local authority has no control. I’m no council apologist – I’ve had too many parking fines for that – but to rank the performance of local authorities against each other in areas where they have no remit to take action is the height of unfairness.

I’m all for presenting complex situations simply, and I can see what OFSTED have tried to do, but this over-simplification of the facts does nothing but obfuscate them. In any kind of ranking there will be a winner at the top and a loser at the bottom, but in this case the ranking is so meaningless, due to the massive variation within the reported units and the lack of control of the local authorities over the schools within their boundaries. Miriam Rosen, HM Inspector of Schools, knows this, and might as well not have bothered.

Why I started a blog, and why I won't be doing my Christmas shopping at ASDA this year

Last night I saw an advertisement on the TV for UK supermarket chain ASDA. The entirety of the voiceover has escaped me, but was along the lines of, "Great Christmases don't just happen. Every great Christmas starts with a mum".

This immediately infuriated me, so I did what I normally do when infuriated by something I see or hear, whether on television, the radio, out on the street or in a newspaper - tweeted. I love Twitter, and have all but stopped using Facebook, preferring Twitter's clean interface and ease of use. Incandescent with rage, I blasted the following tweet into cyberspace:

New @ASDA advert: "behind every great#Christmas is mum". One in the eye for everyone in a non-traditional family situation there.

It's only fair to draw to your attention to the fact that, by my usual standards, this is mild. I also thought that it was pretty self-explanatory. The reaction it provoked on Facebook would indicate otherwise. I should probably point out that my tweets also post to Facebook.

Twitter is great training for expressing oneself succinctly, but I already knew that there are certain occasions where it is not possible to express the full complexity of one's opinion or argument in 140 characters or fewer. On these occasions, I usually resort to rearranging sentences, shortening words, removing pronouns and, as a last resort, spilling over to a second tweet. This is less than elegant. There are times where a lengthier explanation is necessary to fully explore what needs to be said. This is one of those situations, so it is high time that I stopped being lazy and started a blog. That I have done.

Advertising for Christmas on 4 November is bad enough, but ASDA is hardly alone in this. I've seen Christmas-themed advertisements for a well-known furniture chain from the beginning of October; we got the White Company's Christmas catalogue through the door two weeks ago and I've seen Boots' version on display for about the same length of time; Harrods and Selfridges both have their obscenely ostentatious Christmas displays out for what seems like all year round, and it can only be a few more days until the Coca Cola lorries are all over my television set telling me that holidays are coming. But there is something far more offensive about the ASDA advertisement that hit a switch in me.

Let us start with the first thought that hit me - that in my tweet. Many people have perfectly enjoyable Christmases every year that don't even include a mother, let alone start with one. The widower left to look after his children after the death of his wife, the couple who are child-free (intentionally or otherwise), the person whose parents are no longer with us - all would be quite within their rights to take offence at this advertisement. Can not they too have a great Christmas? Not according to ASDA. All great Christmases start with a mum.

Secondly, this advertisement makes a massive value judgement about the "right" type of family. The subtext of this advertisement is quite clearly that a nuclear family is the best type of family. There are a myriad of reasons why, in certain circumstances, and for certain people, this might not be the case. Relationships can become abusive, where it becomes impossible for one parent to remain with the other, a partner may pass away, children may need to be re-homed with foster or adoptive parents - I could go on. ASDA seems to have this covered in terms of single mums, but not single dads. What are they to do? After all, they can't have a great Christmas.

Thirdly, the advertisement further entrenches established gender roles within our society. Women exist to breed, and to look after the children they have borne. A mother's role is to make Christmas great. Only a mother can do that. Without mum, Christmas cannot be great.  Dad can help, if he wants, but cannot alone make Christmas great (mum can though). This is offensive to both women and men, whether parents or not. ASDA's statement simultaneously pigeonholes women as the home maker, and devalues men's roles. Why cannot a great Christmas start with dad? Or, for that matter, granddad, grandma, uncle, auntie or whoever else? Dad might do all the work, but it's just not great, according to ASDA, if it's not started by mum.

Finally, within the subtext of this advertisement is the implication that all mums are great all of the time. This is something that is becoming more and more pervasive in advertising - Unilever's Dove soap started it all off with their "In support of Mums" campaign, again with the not-so-subtle implication that the pinnacle of female  achievement is to be impregnated, complete the gestation period, and give birth. But the fact is, mums are people. They have lives outside of their children and are individuals in their own right. Most mums are incredibly dedicated to raising their children, but all are imperfect as are all human beings. There are also some mothers who are downright not very nice people. I do apologise for stating the obvious. What are the children of such mothers to do over the festive season? One thing's for sure - if they're not spending it with mum, their Christmas won't be great.

Perhaps I've lost all sense of proportion, but this advert seems to push every button for me. It might be "only an advertisement", but advertisements reflect the sentiments of our time and influence our thoughts, opinions and behaviour. The gollywog on Robertson's jam may be long gone (thank goodness), but it's still apparently acceptable to sexualise men in adverts for Diet Coke and objectify women in ads for Lynx. The influence of communication is not dictated by its medium - after all, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf is "only a book" and Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood was "only a speech". I am not suggesting that this advertisement is anywhere near as destructive or overtly evil as either of these works, but by defining the gravity of our statements by the media by which they are delivered we put ourselves at risk of allowing the method of delivery mask the atrocity of the message.

In actual fact, there are many more and better reasons not to do my Christmas shopping at ASDA than their distasteful advertisement. There are far more interesting and exciting places to buy Christmas fare than ASDA, for which the best compliment I can muster is that their uninspiring offer is no worse than the predictable and formulaic bland range of goods on display at the rest of the big four. London has many fabulous places to buy food in addition to the excellent Borough Market - between the Ginger Pig in South Hackney, the many greengrocers in Roman Road, and the wonderful Broadway Market you can get everything you need for Christmas dinner without setting foot in a supermarket.

And besides, I'm eating out this year.