You guys should be ashamed of yourselves giving me all these options. I couldn't make up my mind so I knew I needed some yogurt for the gyros so I made a gallon of that. While that was setting I decided to try the leg of lamb. So I tweeked a few recipes and came up with this concoction. Basically, I stuck some rosemary and cloves of garlic into the meat then made a rub out of olive oil, garlic and rosemary and thyme and rubbed the meat down hoping the olive oil would do its trick on lamb like it does on pork. On a whim, I made an oil rub using some oil and some rub I concocted a while back an marinated some potatoes an carrots. My hope is the fat from the lamb will drip all over this and make something of a side dish.
I then went to work on the gyro meat as suggested by JerBear. Since I don't have a rotisserie and I was going to smoke the leg of lamb I decided to stuff the meat into a casing and see how that worked. Due to concern about it getting greasy I poked a bunch of holes in the casings hoping this would allow any excess grease to run out while it smoked at 175F.
Gyro meat ready for stuffing
Stuffed
As I was finishing this up I looked at all the scrap meat I had in a tub and decided I'd use this to make a Basque type stew like NorCal suggested. Since all the scrap meat was tiny and in hard to get places I just tossed all this in a pot with garlic, rosemary and salt and just cooked it down. Once it cooled I pulled the meat off the bones and out of all the little nooks and crannies and ended up with about 4 lbs of meat from the three carcasses.
I studied the Basque spice profile and looked in the garden and found some onions and assorted peppers. I threw a bunch of this together using some rendered lamb fat and sauteed onions and garlic in this fat then added the rest of the stuff from the garden along with some of the spices prevelant in Basque type stew. Instead of greek wine I use blueberry wine and reduced this.
Once I thought I had the flavors right I somewhere remembered these stews were a bit on the warm side so I added a concoction I made a few weeks ago called "A woman's scorn". This defiintely negated the need to added cayene pepper in the mix. I then added the salvaged scrap meat.
Then I decided to heed ElDucko's advice on the Loukaniko sausages. Of course I didn't have any oranges or orange juice. What in the world? But I followed it to the letter even soaking the casings in orange juice. Len Poli has never steered me wrong yet but I gotta say I've never heard of doing this but maybe its for the four hour hang time. Don't know.
For supper I had a bowl of the lamb soup and some patties made from the meat left in the horn. So far I can say the soup is wonderful, the loukaniko is terrific and the gyro meat is fantastic.
Since there is no way we can eat all this I decided to can the stew as well as some lamb broth while I'm waiting on the leg of lamb the gyro to finish smoking. I'm about tired but I have some corn squeezings I'm fixing to infuse in my body while I wait and this should ease the pains.
Here is the modified gyros in the upright
And the leg of lamb in the horizontal
Oh, thank you for the inspiration. Had ya'll not layed these temptations in front of the weak soul I'd have probably wasted a day fishing or something.
