Lamb 'n' mint

I scrounged a bit of mint from my garden the other night to make a mint sauce (p186). The obvious accompaniment to mint sauce is lamb, traditionally roast lamb (how amusing that I think in terms of what meat should be "an accompaniment" to a sauce. It's supposed to be the other way around). I wasn't about to do a whole lamb roast just for myself, however, so I just cooked a couple of lamb chops instead.



For my usual half-recipe, I needed 1/8 cup of chopped mint leaves, firmly packed. I overestimated how many leaves this would require, and found myself with much more than I needed. For a while I toyed with using this to make mint and apple jelly, but after a careful perusal of the recipe, I decided it wasn't going to be practical. I'll have to find non-Edmonds uses for that extra mint.


Putting my chopped mint in the bottom of a jug, I covered it with boiling water, then added malt vinegar, sugar and salt to taste. A bit of a stir, and the sauce is ready to go. The rest of my dinner wasn't, though, but it didn't harm the sauce to leave it sitting while I rested my lamb chops and mashed the potatoes.


When all was ready, I poured a generous amount of sauce over chop and potatoes. I have to say I liked this sauce as much or more than any version I've tried out of a bottle. The vinegar is a bit pungent, (you might want to add it a little more sparingly than it says in the recipe, then adjust to taste) but it doesn't overwhelm the mint. This sauce is so easy to make, that if you've got a bit of mint in the garden, there's no reason why you should ever have to buy mint sauce in a bottle.