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• Good Food's 20 most popular lamb recipes of all time

• Adam Liaw's Roasted lamb shoulder recipe with garlic milk gravy

I often slow-roast a shoulder of lamb but find there's never enough time, especially when it's needed for Sunday lunch. R. Bailley

Wake up. Remove shoulder from the fridge. Turn the oven on as high as it will go: 260C is good. Make tea or coffee. Read the first few pages of the paper. Place the shoulder on the baking tray. Massage the shoulder with olive oil and then with salt. I personally prefer the forequarter complete with neck, ribs and fore shank. Place the tray in the centre of the oven and take yourself off for a shower and get dressed. Have another coffee. If half an hour has passed and the lamb is looking nice and brown turn the oven down to about 100C-120C and go about your business, including going to church if applicable. If not, leave the shoulder in for another 10 minutes. By the time you have done your morning's work and lunch preparation thy lamb will be done. After about four hours, take the shoulder out and let it rest for 15 minutes while you make a sauce or gravy from the juices. As it should now be quite soft, it is possible to break the meat into muscle groups using hands and a knife instead of carving off uniform slices. Serve with some lovely red wine.

Can I half slow-roast a shoulder of lamb one day and then finish it off the next? N. Shoobridge

Crikey! You are time poor! You could. But you'll lose a lot of the moisture in the flesh as the muscles tighten and relax and tighten again as you cook it. Why don't you put the lamb in the oven overnight? Preheat the oven to high. Put the lamb on a bed of veg and some wine, season the skin, give it a hot blast for 30 minutes then turn the heat down as low as the oven will go. Go to bed. You will wake to a juicy slow-cooked shoulder. The only drawback is that your sleep will be interrupted by dreams of medieval feasts and Sunday dinners.

​For marinades in recipes that call to marinate for a few hours or overnight, which is correct? V. Klestadt

Marinades increase flavour and tenderise flesh. This happens in two ways. Firstly, the marinade itself will often contain compounds that will break down muscles from the outside in. Acids such as lemon juice and vinegar denature the protein while enzymes in fruit such as kiwi and pineapple very quickly break down muscle. The second way comes from enzymes within the muscle. By covering flesh in liquid, one is stopping airborne bugs getting into your food. Compounds in herbs and spices such as rosemary, garlic and paprika inhibit the growth of bad bugs. This bides time for the enzymes in the flesh to break down the proteins in the muscle fibres into amino acids, giving the double whammy of both tenderising the flesh and giving your meal some extra umami kick. Smaller pieces of meat, chicken or fish need less time marinating, so a few hours for chicken pieces for skewers on the barbecue will flavour them up; however, if you're cooking a great shoulder of lamb you might start the morning before and keep it in the fridge until the next day.

After enjoying shoulders of lamb for more than 60 years, I have abandoned lamb as it has become tasteless. What has happened? D.D. McNicoll

You could have simply got old and lost your sense of taste and smell. I suspect, however, judging from the other statements in your letter, you are quite knowledgeable about lamb. If you like tender lamb, wait until spring when the first flush of young lambs are butchered. If you like flavour, try to hunt down lamb from the old English breeds, sheep bred for their meat, not their wool. Most Australian lamb comes from sheep that are part merino, and I reckon this gives them a strong whiff of lanolin.

I like the taste of lamb but don't like the way it makes the kitchen smell when I cook it. Is there a solution? S. Eynaud

Yes, several. One, cook the lamb in the barbecue outside. Two, install a stronger extraction fan. Three, make lamb tartare. Four, go to a friend's house and cook it there. In the US, where they don't have such a strong lamb-eating tradition as we do here, they can really find the lamb cooking smell quite offensive and go to extraordinary lengths, such as trimming off all the exterior fat and soaking the raw meat in fresh milk. Spring lamb – flesh from prepubescent animals born in autumn-winter – tends to have milder aroma. I find the breed of sheep affects the strength of that sheepy, lanolin-like cooking smell – multipurpose animals such as merino-border leicester cross have stronger meat. Look out for traditional English meat breeds such as black suffolk and wiltshire horn.