Very easy lamb with olive paste

This is DELICIOUS, and so easy it's almost cheating. But not in the sense of going out and buying some horrible supermarket sauce and calling it cooking. This is posh cheating, and no-one will guess if you don't tell them. So long as you mix it up before they come. Which I didn't. It tastes of the mediterranean, of sunshine and the south.

The recipe came from Tamasin Day Lewis's Kitchen Bible, which I bought last week, and which is worth a look (although Anna says she's very annoying on TV, but I didn't know she did telly). As soon as I saw it, I knew I'd cook it this weekend, when we have a crowd of dear friends (who are actually relations), all of whom are wonderful cooks and appreciate good food, and all of whom are people I'd rather be talking to. This really is good food for a crowd. Quick too, in the sense of how much of the cook's time it takes, although it's in the oven for a couple of hours.

To each kilo of lamb, you need 200g of black olive paste. TDL specifies shoulder of lamb, but the wonderful butchers at Gabriel Machin in Henley said that neck fillet would be just as good but better value. So that's what I used.

Tip the meat into a casserole. Pour on the olive paste. Mix everything well, clamp on the lid and cook for two hours at 150C.

You'll get a glossy black stew, plenty of wonderful salty sauce - very grown up, and no-one would ever guess how little effort went into it.

We ate it in the garden by candlelight, with little new potatoes and two salads ... one was chicory (very prettily sliced lengthwise, I've never done that, clever Anna, stupid me) and watercress, the other lettuce and tomatoes, some fresh, some slow roasted. Wonderful.

Next time, I'll add a branch of thyme. When I cook it in the winter, I'll add a long long strip of orange peel.