She Puts The Lamb in the Oven, plus, flower pictures - preparing the garden for Spring

Jordan Lamb Shoulder Bone In – hmm? Sounded intriguing. I’ve never made a Jordan Lamb Shoulder Bone In before, but it sounded good. So, I brought Jordan Lamb Shoulder Bone In home. To the serious dismay of all the household felines, I did NOT give the huge chunk of meat to them directly, immediately, or even as soon as I walked in the door. I know, I’m mean that way. Instead, I washed it up, got out the biggest baking sheet I own, and lay the shoulder on a long piece of foil. I drizzled it with olive oil, sprinkled salt, pepper, and rosemary all over. I also added a bit of vinegar to the oil simply because most slow roast/oven BBQ methods I’ve tried in the past call for a bit of vinegar and I can’t argue with the results. I flipped the meat and did the other side. Placing the meatiest side up, I covered the whole with another long sheet of foil, rolled/sealed all the edges tightly, and popped it into a 275F oven. It’s there now. Hopefully, it is resigning itself to becoming a delicious, slow cooked, falling off the Bone In Jordan Lamb Shoulder. At least that’s what I told it to do. The cats are not in here anymore. I suppose they are sulking in another room somewhere, or googling how to open an oven door, or just taking a nap because cats are easily distracted by a good nap. I’ll make some potatoes and fresh salad to go with it this evening. Wish me luck!

In the meantime – enjoy some Spring flowers!

Remember when I tore up my garden? I thoroughly thinned out the jungle vines and cut back the scraggly shrubs. I gave it quite a severe haircut, but it truly needed it. After the carnage was cleaned up, it looked like this:

 

Rather nekkid, but think of it as a blank slate … I bought some flowers: a small gardenia, a kumquat (it was so little and needy, like a Charlie Brown tree.. it had to come home with us), and pansies, but for the most part, I gave the box of crayolas to an 8yo to color in. She chose random pretty things:

A purple cabbage thingy (3-4 of them, and some white ones too)

Several Ranunculus in various colors. There’s a mini-rose bush, with dark red blooms, behind this plant. Honor picked the rose plant for her brother.

Here’s my gardenia – I hope it thrives (our soil is very poor, so ..??). It’s one of my favorite flowering shrubs, with it’s glossy dark leaves and pure white rosette blooms with a heavenly smell! mmm!

 

We also have these, whatever they are:

 

And because you can never have enough plants and flowers, we have pots. Here are some pepper and tomato seedlings, and rose cuttings taken from the trimming I did.

I was going to plant the rose stems, but Honor watched the process, then took over and did them all:

We started an experiment with seeds in these little planters.. just to see how they do.

 

And Honor started a little fairy garden in a terrarium to put in the kitchen window

We also had some potted plants inside because hyacinths smell so lovely! They can go in the garden for next year.

 

All in all, we had a very good time picking out plants and getting our flower beds ready for the warmer weather… now all we need is warmer weather. Ok, we have had some slightly less cool days, but I feel like we’ve been stuck in March for some time now. (Can that be my excuse for not blogging much? Being stuck back in March?) Anyway, our plants are doing very well now. I think they definitely benefitted from the extreme clean-out I imposed on them. I’ll post some more photos later to show what we’ve got growing now and how well how new additions are doing.