This Easter we cooked an outdoor feast for our friends. We built a pit oven, filling it with hot stones heated in the fire. I wrapped a joint of spring lamb in wheat dough and put the whole veg in a cast iron pot seeled with dough. We then placed all of this in the pit and covered it with more hot stones from the fire. We left it all to slowly cook for three hours- and in the mean time we had an easter egg hunt. Amazingly 35 out of the 37 eggs I hid in the woods were found and Ottie (the dog) i’m sure will find the other two at some point. When Alex lifted the hot stones three hours later it was all still too hot to touch, so Alex carefully lifted them with a large spade. He dug out the lamb which was encrusted in the dough, which had now turned into bread and was hard and black on the outside. When he put the spade in he made a crack in the bread and the smell of the cooked lamb wafted out, it smelt ready to eat and we were all starving after waiting for three hours!
We took the lamb to the table and I just about managed to carve through the crusted bread into the joint. The lamb fell off the bone and the bread was perfect on the inside, having taken in all the juices and rosemary from the lamb. Jo took the cooked bread from around the cast iron pot, inside the potatoes, carrots and onions were perfectly cooked. All this made for quite a feast as you can see from the pictures and film below.
