Our cooking instructions are just a guide. Your cut of meat may vary slightly in thickness, it may be warmer or cooler when it hits the pan and your oven or hob may behave differntly to ours. Use our instructions as a guide, but deploy your senses too; look, prod, listen and smell while you cook. After all, cookery should provide us pleasure as well as nourishment.
Preheat the oven to 220°C/Gas Mark 7.
Place an ovenproof dish into the oven to heat up.
Take a handful of garlic cloves and squash them under your knife.
To a cast iron pan, add a little rapeseed oil or animal fat, such as lard or dripping. Heat the fat and add the garlic cloves skins and all. Toss the garlic in the fat for a minute or so to release the flavour.
Season the lamb chops with a good pinch of pure natural sea salt and then add the lamb chops to the pan, browning them lightly on both sides.
Transfer the lamb chops to the preheated dish. Remove the garlic cloves from the frying pan too, and scatter them over the chops. In the roasting dish, tuck a few sprigs of rosemary and sage so they nestle in closely to the chops.
Roast the chops in the oven for around 15 minutes, until the meat is cooked to your liking and the fat has crisped nicely.
Serve with some seasonal vegetables.