Za'atar-roasted lamb on fregola, squash with spiced yoghurt

Fusion food

When cooking for friends I always feel an irresistible pull to try new recipes.

If anything this is the time to turn to the tried and tested, dishes I can throw together without breaking a sweat, the guaranteed showstoppers. But I can never quite escape the feeling that my guests will somehow know these are boring old staples, prosaic for me even if they aren’t for them.

So it is I find myself nursing a day-after-a-wedding hangover and furiously roaming Islington’s bougiest delicatessens on an ultimately fruitless hunt for mograbiah, as time runs out to marinate my lamb for the just-a-little-too-fussy dinner I’ve committed myself to assembling in not quite enough time.

My small library of cookbooks is half the problem here, forever tempting me with the recipes untried, the dishes untasted. I can sporadically find the energy to explore their pages when cooking for myself or my partner, but there’s nothing like a dinner party to get me decanting volumes across the coffee table, espresso in hand, while I plot a feast.

This weekend we settled on a one-two of Nigel Slater and Sabrina Ghayour. The former’s A Cook’s Book supplied a roast lamb leg on a bed of mograbiah, broad beans, radishes, and a heaping helping of dill; the latter’s Persiana offered an autumnal side of roasted squash dressed in spiced yoghurt and pickled chillies.

The pair were picked for their key common element: almost identical marinades of za’atar and olive oil, a fact I spectacularly failed to capitalise on by instead making each separately, one after the other, dirtying double the crockery. I’ll just count myself lucky that I never made it as far as washing up the measuring spoons between batches.

I always enjoy looking for these synergies between my books, disparate recipes from unrelated chefs finding a little common ground. Here it’s the none-more-British Nigel Slater offering a Middle Eastern lamb leg roast with an Anglican flourish in its radishes and broad beans, while Sabrina Ghayour brings Persian spices to the not-especially-Persian butternut squash.

Slater’s lamb cooks fast and hot - perhaps a little too so, not quite coming out pink even as I aimed for the lower end of his cooking times - and we muddle things by swapping the elusive mograbiah for Italian fregola pasta. Cooked al dente, it adds a little bite to the base while soaking up the lamb juices admirably.

Sliced into thin strips, the squash crisps while the lamb rests, before a drenching in sumac-spiced yoghurt and mint, a shower of parsley, and a scattering of searing pickled red chillies that I now have a whole jar of to play around with.

For dessert, we broke our own principles: madeleines made their third outing in a row for friends. An almost perfect make-ahead dessert that still lets you show off a little when it’s time to serve, these will get a post of their own in due course. For the first time they don’t rise for us, victims of the late lie-in that cut too far into the time they need to proof.

Of course, half the joy of any big meal - especially a roast - lies in the leftovers. Cold sliced lamb layered on top of yoghurt sauce, decorated with razor-thin radish, shredded dill, and another pinch of pickled red peppers. All squeezed a little indelicately into a Brick Lane bagel, drunkenly bought in the post-wedding blur.