Two easy lamb and cod dishes transformed by quick flavoursome sauces

I’m drawing on some restaurant inspiration this week, with two dishes that may look a little fancy to the eye, but which are packed with handy tips and tricks from the professional kitchen.

To start, we are using lamb rump. This may not be a familiar cut in the home kitchen, but can be found on restaurant menus across the country. The meat is slightly tougher in texture than the more commonplace leg or loin, but repays you in flavour. I like to cook mine a bit further as the sinew that can run through a rump is chewy and unpleasant if undercooked.

Rumps are taken from the meat just above the lamb’s backside (for want of a better term). As such, it’s a muscle that works a bit harder than the aforementioned cuts. Imagine if you had to climb up and down mountains all day.

You can ask your butcher to prepare them for you and then let them tick away in a pan on the fat side to render and melt it down, then a quick run through the oven and a good rest and it will be ready for slicing. The magic of this recipe is in the restaurant-style sauce or ‘jus gras’. This refers to a sauce made from the juices of the meat split with the fat, often in a 50:50 ratio.

Roast lamb rump with jus gras, peas and mint

Two flexible time-saving dishes with big flavours you can eat any time

Hot and sour chicken and sweetcorn broth with egg and noodles

Sesame and miso baked salmon bowl with peanut and carrot coleslaw

As the meat rests, it blends with the fat we rendered down at the beginning of the process. I use this as the sauce base, adding chicken stock for a lighter, more seasonal finish. A splash of fresh lemon juice brightens it even further, and you now have a restaurant quality sauce to serve.

The second dish involves steaming fresh cod for a beautiful light supper. There are two key tricks to note here. The first is the addition of sugar, as well as salt, to the blanching water. This really brings out the natural sugars in green vegetables and is also very handy for removing the bitterness often associated with cabbage and sprouts.

The second trick is the vinegar butter. This is a version of the classic beurre blanc, with the addition of cream stabilising the mix so the butter won’t split. Reducing equal quantities of white wine and white wine vinegar also gives a lovely balance to the sauce. In the restaurant we call this Beurre Nantais and it has always been a good friend to a piece of fresh fish.