Gigot a la cuillere

Two years ago, for Christmas, my cousins wife departed from the traditional "gigot de noel" and instead of seeing the entire family fight over 5 minutes more or less of cooking time, she cooked it for the entire day. Yes you read it, the whole day, not 35 minutes nor 40. It was so delicious that since then, this is my preferred way of preparing it. So if you want to get that juicy, melting in the mouth lamb taste, here is how you do it, and it's so easy that I doubt anyone can fail.
To reproduce what I did last sunday, you will need:
- a lamb leg that fits in your dish, we had ~7 pounds of meat with the bone. Got it at our local New Seasons market, they cut off the shank so it would not be too big.
- a dozen of garlic cloves (don't peel them)
- a dozen of mushrooms (the "champignon de Paris" kind)
- 3-4 carrots cut in large chunks
- 2 bay leaves
- a pinch of salt
- optional: a few slices of bacon
Preheat the oven at 275F (135C, that s very low). Put the lamb leg in your oven proof dish (eventually lay the slices of bacon at the bottom of the dish). If there is a side with more fat start with it at the bottom. Add the other ingredients in the dish and 2 glasses of water. Cover with aluminum foil. Put in the Oven for 10 hours. After a few hours (3-5), turn the meat, remove the extra juice and save it for later (pour a bit of juice on the meat). You might want to check another time that there isn't too much juice.
Towards the end you might want to remove the foil and put the oven on broil to finish it. What I did is about 1 hour before the end I added potatoes in another dish with some of the juice and baked them at 400 (leaving the meat covered by the foil). It worked perfectly. Reheat the juice that you saved so your guests can soak their meat as much as they want ! No picture, we destroyed it before I even thought of bringing the camera.


You might want to serve that with green beans, and M would certainly suggest finishing with a raspberry chiffon pie :).