One of the things I now do on a regular basis, usually once every month or two, is buy an entire boneless leg of lamb from Costco. I prep it during a weekend afternoon into cutlets, chunks, and/or ground lamb, all of which I find very useful in the kitchen, none of which are readily available in supermarkets, at least for a reasonable price and quality. Since I was planning on breaking down one such leg today, I thought I'd break in the new BastardCam (cheapo digital camera for kitchen use) and document the process.

This is where we start - the whole leg, after it's been drained, removed from the netting, and briefly rinsed. As you can see, there's a large layer of fat over the top of it, which is great to have when you're roasting a whole leg, but not terribly helpful for what we're doing. Start by flipping the leg over onto the fat side and spreading it out, thusly:

The inside of every leg is going to be somewhat different, but as a general rule, you can think of it in three parts - the left, the middle, and the right. The left section is the one you can generally count on to be full of nice, solid, lean lamb meat. The right section is generally shot through with more fat and connective tissue. The middle section can go either way depending on the particular leg. In any case, what I do is, fining the natural seams of the meat with my knife, cut it into those three sections for easier handling.

At this point, it's time to start trimming. What I'm looking to remove is the thick fat layer, most of any silverskin or membranes I can get off, and any significant chunks or veins of gristle or connective tissue. You can leave some of it, it's not that big of a deal, but you want to get rid of the majority. Today, the middle section was almost as nice as the left section, so I trimmed that too. The right section I leave alone completely - its destiny lies elsewhere. Here's the left side, trimmed up:

Next I prep the lean meat for whatever application I'm planning. You can do large cubes for kebabs, smaller cubes for curry, but when the meat is this nice, I like to make cutlets about an inch thick and 6-8 inches long, which are great marinated and grilled. So that's what I did here:

These can be set aside for later, or wrapped up and frozen for the future. It's time to turn our attention to the rightmost piece, which is destined for the grinder. That's why I didn't bother trimming it. I've found this piece generally has a good fat-lean ratio right out of the box, as it were. If you like your ground lamb fattier, you can always reserve some of the top fat layer, but if you like your ground lamb fattier and gray, you can skip all this and just go to the store. Anyway, before it's ground, it needs to be chunked so that it fits in the grinder:

At this point, all that's left to do is hook the grinder up to the front of the Kitchenaid and get going. I generally grind on the second speed setting, moving it up to 3 if things seem to be sticking. Any faster and the whole thing just gets too warm.

Once everything's ground, I give it a light toss a few times with my hands to evenly distribute the fat through the meat.

Until recently, I parted out the lamb into what I thought were about one pound each, but I was basing it roughly on the volume of a pound of ground beef, which is much denser, especially in the package. Now that I have a scale, I could weigh this out - it was just a couple of ounces over two pounds total, which gave me two about-a-pound loafs.

These get wrapped in plastic wrap, then foil, then labeled, then frozen. This would be closer to three pounds if I'd used the middle section. Out of a lamb leg that came it at just under 5 pounds, and just under $20, I got two-plus pounds of lamb cutlets and two-plus pounds of ground lamb, and all I dirtied was one knife, one cutting board, one grinder attachment, and one mixing bowl. And you've never, ever bought ground lamb this good from a grocery store, trust me.