When the circumstances of our country are out of my control… which is pretty much every day that I am not able to vote, I just have to throw my energy at the things that I love, like food and cooking. I spent the last couple of days shopping and prepping for our lamb barbacoa meal tonight. I made the ancho and guajillo-chile-based marinade on Friday, purchased the tomatillos for the salsa verde yesterday, and then wrapped up the Australian lamb leg in banana leaves today and roasted it for just over two hours. I wasn’t sure how long to roast it for given the original recipe had an eight-pound leg and said to roast it for eight hours, and I had a five-pound leg. So I started researching roasting a lamb leg and decided that just over two hours would be enough… but it really wasn’t. It was certainly done. It tasted good and certainly tasted like lamb and barbacoa, but the pull-apart tenderness was not there likely because I didn’t roast it for long enough. Then, I went back to the harissa lamb leg recipe I used last time I made lamb at home that was very tender, and that was a four-pound leg that I left in the oven for five hours. The roasting also wasn’t long enough for the banana leaf flavor to really penetrate the meat. I cut up the meat feeling disappointed.

This is one of the reasons I hear when people say that even if they are meat eaters, they don’t like or just completely avoid preparing meat at home. It can be hit or miss with the timing, doneness, and tenderness. Then, there’s also the factor of messiness because meat fat tends to get everywhere, even when you don’t expect it.