Rack of Lamb with a Sticky Guinness Sauce, on Celeriac and Potato mash.

My first recipe, well my first time cooking something new, in a loooooong time. I was inspired by a recipe in one of Jamie Oliver's books, I made some changes though-I'm sorry but marmalade and lamb is just weird, and ketchup is a bit lazy. I also have a problem with raisins in savoury cooking, the idea appeals to me, and then I find one and I think eeeeeeeh no! This quantity fed two of us easily.

Ingredients-
some rapeseed/olive/whatever oil
1 450g rack of lamb (it had little hats on the tips of the bones-strictly optional.)
Sauce:
4 sprigs of rosemary
2 red onions
3 cloves of garlic
6 sun-dried tomatoes
2 tsp tomato puree
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp worcester sauce
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp muscovado sugar
150ml of guinness (I used 'Foreign Extra' because of it's strong flavour)
1 pint of vegetable stock
Mash:
2 medium potatoes
celeriac-as much as potato
butter-as much as you like (a knob?)
a drop of milk

Method:

1. Chop the garlic and onion nice and fine and put them with a bit of oil into a nice big dish, big enough to comfortably contain your lamb. Fry slowly until the onions start to go a little brown, or caramelised, if you insist. 

2. Put in the rest of the sauce ingredients apart from the stock and rosemary and let it simmer gently on the hob.

3. I cut the lamb into cutlets so that I could get more browned sides, but I'd say you could get a good result from leaving it whole and browning the outside too. That's the next step either way, brown the meat. Make sure it's a nice deep brown. Then put the rosemary on the pan until it's a little crispy, but don't burn it.

4. Put the lamb, rosemary and any juices into the big sauce dish and add the stock. Then put the lid on and cook nice and slowly (I did this one on the hob, and it made for some nice blackened amazingness at the bottom of the pan, but if you are a bit afraid of burning, then an oven at 150°C will do the trick) for about 3 hours. YES 3 HOURS. It's so very worth it, you can just suck the meat off the cutlets after, as evidenced by my last picture.

5. With about 30 minutes cooking time left on the lamb, make the mash. Cut the celeriac and potato into smallish cubes and boil for 15-20 minutes (keep checking the celeriac as it takes a little longer). Mash with the butter and milk, as much of each as you like. I know you all know how to make mash, it's here more for completeness than anything.

This makes for an amazingly tender lamb, as I alluded to above you barely even need a knife and fork. The sauce is quite powerful, but it shouldn't over power the lamb, I thought it was a nice level with the amount of sauce on the picture, but I like a good glut of sauce. Hope you try it and enjoy it, and as always comments are appreciated. Well nice ones are ;)

This picture is to show how clean I got the bones, and plate, but don't take my word for it, I'm a glutton, try it yourself.