Silence of the Lamb

I love dinner parties.  What can say?  I'm Roman Catholic.  We built an entire religion around a dinner party.  Jesus knew that sitting around a table sharing food creates something special.  Good wine paired with good food creates good conversation  and that leads to good friends.  That is, of course, unless you cook the wrong thing.  Then all bets are off.  In fact, maybe that's what was up with Judas.

I've had my share of mistakes.  I once made salmon cakes for a group of people that hated fish.  Instead of raucous laughter and banter all I got was awkward looks as people pushed the food around their plate and asked politely for more bread.  Fortunately, I was allowed to redeem myself.  The next time I got this crew over I had sufficiently interrogated them ahead of time to know everything about their food preferences.  Then there was the lamb debacle.  I had made a couple of gorgeous racks of lamb, and I invited a couple over to share them with us.  Maybe they thought we said "racks of spam," but either way they were so fearful  of the menu that they passed on the invite altogether.  From their perspective, I suppose they figured that if I willing to serve up lamb--or spam, then dog and cat couldn't be far behind.  I never realized that some people think of lamb as some kind of weird ethnic delicacy.  Just for the record, it tastes nothing like chicken.  In any event, we never could bridge the culinary gap, and I never got them back over.  Suffice it to say that dinner that night was very very quiet.

Despite it's history, I love this recipe for roasted rack of lamb.  I still make it for guests--albeit with plenty of advance notice and express approval.  Make this recipe at your own risk.  It cost me a couple of friends, or at least a really good dinner party.


Roasted Rack of Lamb


1.  Gently saute a fine dice of about 6 large shallots until they are nicely caramelized.  Shallots are a weird little onion about the size of a small head of garlic.  They have a mild onion-garlic flavor, but pack the same punch as a regular onion when you are cutting them; prepare to cry.

2.  Add 6 Tbsp of balsamic vinegar and boil until all of the vinegar evaporates or is absorbed by the shallots.

3.   Add 1 cup of fresh bread crumbs and 3 Tbsp of fresh thyme.   Salt and pepper to taste.

4.  Trim all the visible fat from two racks of lamb.  They are fatty little devils, but fortunately most of the fat rests right on the top of the rack.  It's a time consuming step, and when you're done you'll look like a surgeon at a M*A*S*H unit, but you'll be amazed at how much fat you'll pull off.  Your heart will thank you.

5.  After trimming the lamb, spread about 1 tsp of Dijon mustard on each rack.

6.  Generously coat each rack of lamb with the shallot-bread crumb mixture.  Actually, you'll have a lot of this stuff and you sort of wind up packing it on top of, and all around, the lamb.

7.  Roast in an oven pre-heated to 400 degrees for about 25-30 minutes for medium rare.

8.  Serve with roasted fingerling potatoes and a seasonal green vegetable.  Pair with a nice Syrah or Shiraz.  Marvel that someone would pass on this meal.  Their loss.

Saving Salad

Ho-hum.  

Let's face it.  Salads are boring.  You take a ubiquitous head of lettuce and toss it with chopped vegetables and pour some bottled dressing all over it.  If you are like me, the inside door of your refrigerator is littered with half-used bottles of prepared dressing like tombstones in some forgotten graveyard.  Each one marks a failed  attempt to add some mojo to what is essentially a flavorless pile of produce.   No one in my family but me eats salad, and I do it so that I can justify eating something good.  My teen-age daughter refuses to eat salad "until there's a free and united Ireland."  She's in this boycott for the long haul.  No more.

I've found the solution to ho-hum salad.  Bacon. Notice I didn't say "bacon bits."  "Bacon bits'" are freeze-dried artificially flavored pellets of I don't know what, but never ever put anything on your food that looks like rabbit droppings.   To really transform something as boring as the typical salad, you need bring out the cast iron fry pan, put down a slab of fatty meat, and sizzle it crisp.   Add some caramelized onion and place it hot on a bed of arugula or spinach.   Nod in silent recognition that if you add bacon to Brussels sprouts,your family might even eat those too.

 

Warm Arugula Salad

1.  Fry one pound of sliced bacon.  Fry it long enough so that's its crisp enough to crumble.

2.  Peel, half, quarter, and and quarter again 4 medium sized red onions.

3.  Saute the onions in about 2 Tbs of the bacon fat until they are slightly brown and caramelized.  Add about 1 tsp of fresh thyme, and salt and pepper to taste.  Add the crumbled bacon and set aside until ready to serve.

4.  In a separate bowl, lightly toss baby arugula or spinach in a dressing of 2 parts olive oil and one part balsamic vinegar.  Realize that this simple dressing is the only salad dressing that you will really ever need, and start throwing away everything in the refrigerator featuring the words "Hidden Valley" or sporting Paul Newman's face.

5.  Place the greens on individual serving plates.

6.  Add about a large handful of pine nuts to the bacon/onion mixture and re-fry on medium heat until the pine nuts start to turn golden brown.

7.  Place a large dollop of the bacon/onion/pine nut mixture on each bed of greens.  Serve immediately.

-- 

Auld Lang Syne

New Year's Eve always make me feel a bit melancholy.  Forced fun and mandatory kissing have never been my idea of a good time.  And let's face it, trotting out Dick Clark every year is just sad.  Once the hoopla of Christmas is over, it's like one long funeral dirge to bury the old year.  This year is no different, although instead of thinking about lost opportunities and lost friends, I've been thinking a lot about lost traditions. 

My mom is Italian and my dad is Southern.  Growing up, New Year's Eve was marked with an age-old dish from the Adriatic Coast: fried fish smothered in anchovy sauce.  In the old country it was likely the Church's way of supporting the local fish industry, and it stuck.

Then, on New Year's Day we'd be greeted by the smell of black-eyed peas simmering over a ham hock.  Your luck in the New Year was measured by how many of the slimy spotted beans you'd be willing to eat.  Not eating any was a pact with Bad Luck, and thus, not an option.  I could usually coax one down my throat.

When I married, my husband--normally more than happy to snarf down anything I put in front of him-- could never get his palate around the anchovy sauce, and I pretty much quit eating back-eyed peas the year I turned 18.  My children don't have these traditions, and for some reason--that saddens me.   Call it middle age or just misplaced nostalgia, but this year I'm ringing in the New Year with fried fish, anchovy sauce and black-eyed peas.  Auld Lang Syne, my friends, auld lang syne.

Fried Fish

1.  Purchase about 2 lbs of a mild, but firm white fish, like haddock or flounder, scaled and filleted.  Avoid tilapia, it's too fragile for this recipe.

2.  In a small bowl mix about 2 cups of Italian bread crumbs and 2 Tbs dried parsley.

3.  In a small pie plate or fluted dish, vigorously beat 2 eggs until the whites and yolks are fully blended.

4.  Heat about 1/4 inch of olive oil in a large frying pan until just smoking.

5.  Dredge a fish fillet with the egg wash, then dredge it through the breadcrumbs so that it is fully coated on both sides, and then dredge it through the egg wash one more time.  Fry it until golden brown.  Repeat with every piece of fish until you're done.  You may need to mix up more egg wash and breadcrumbs.

Anchovy Sauce

1.  On low heat in a large sauce pan, mix together the following:  Two 27-ounce cans of tomato puree or crushed whole tomatoes, 2 large cloves of garlic--mashed, 1 Tbs dried parsley, 1 can of flat anchovies, with the oil, 1/4 tsp dried red pepper flakes, 1/2 Tbs capers--chopped, 1/2 cup chopped kalamata olives (optional), salt and pepper to taste.    Simmer for about 2 hours until thick.  Add a can of tomato paste about half-way through if necessary.

2.  Serve over the fried fish and a generous helping of rotini pasta.

Black-eyed Peas

1.  Rinse and clean one pound of dried black-eyed peas.  Drain.

2.  Chop and saute over medium heat one small onion until soft and translucent--about 10 minutes.

3.  Add the now-cleaned beans to a large sauce pan, and cover with water--about 4 cups.  Add the cooked onion and one ham hock.

4.  Simmer over medium-low heat until tender.  Drain any excess water.  Remove the hammock and add any bits of meat to the beans.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Remark on how much better these taste since when you were a kid.

5.  Have a very Happy New Year.

Bloody Borscht

I've figured out why the Russians lost the Cold War. It wasn't the influence of Western culture or military spending during the Reagan administration. The Russians lost the Cold War because of borscht. The national soup of the Motherland is one mother to make. A country can only do so well economically when a disproportionate share of its labor force is spent making soup. Historians may ultimately disagree, but I'm sticking to my theory.   There's a reason that there's a McDonald's on Red Square and it isn't because Big Macs taste so good. The Bolsheviks were done in by borscht.


Borscht 
An adaptation of a recipe by Ann Simon.

1.  Cover a one and a half pot roast, bone in, with water.  Believe it or not, it's tough to find a pot roast these days with the bone in.  I wound up paying 67cents a pound for two beef bones.  It was more than a little annoying to pay $2.50 for a couple of bones that the butcher was going to throw in the trash, but hey, it's the capitalist way.

2.  Add about 1 Tbsp each of the finely chopped stems of cilantro and dill.  This step takes FOREVER because you have pull off the leaves and THEN chop the stems.  Those stems are tiny.  It takes A LOT of stems to get to a Tablespoon.  Save the leaves to garnish when serving--assuming you get that far.

3.  Let the beef and stems simmer on medium heat for about one and half hours, and every 10 minutes or so, skim off the fatty foam. 

4.  Saute in a separate pan about 1/2 cup each of a small dice of carrots, celery, and onion.   Set aside.

5.  Slice really thin one small cabbage or half of a big cabbage.  I recognize that "big" and "small" are relative terms.  "Big" would be the size of Boris Yeltzin's head;  "small" would be about the size of Vladimer Putin's.  

Big Head of Cabbage

Small Head of Cabbage

6.  Meanwhile, boil about 2 pounds of beets in yet another pot.  Boil for 20 minutes until tender.  If, like me, you are running out of space on your stove top, you can also roast the beets for about 45 minutes at 375 degrees, or until tender.    Let them cool.

7.  You forgot to keep skimming the broth, didn't you?  





Bloody, bloody borscht

 8.  When the beets have cooled, peel them.  This is a messy job.  Wear rubber gloves or you'll wander around with more beet blood on your hands than Joseph Stalin had human blood on his.

9.  Grate the beets.  Actually, go buy or borrow or steal a food processor and use that instead.

10.   Check the pot roast and the broth.  Taste the broth to ensure that it is sufficiently "beefy."  If not, add a bouillon cube.  This is also known as cheating.

11. Remove the pot roast from the broth and add the sauteed onions, carrots, and celery.

12.  Simmer for 10 minutes and add the sliced cabbage.

13.  Simmer for 5 minutes more and add the grated beets. 

14.  Peel and dice one potato;  add to the mix.  Are you starting to feel like this recipe is the culinary equivalent of War and Peace?

15.  Add one red or green pepper, thinly sliced.  Simmer some more.

16.  By this time, the beef has likely cooled so that you can cut it into small pieces; add the cut-up beef.

17.  Add 3 sliced tomatoes and the juice of one lemon to preserve that better dead-than-red color.  Cook another 15 minutes.

18.  Add two cloves of minced garlic and 2 tsp of horseradish..

19.  Serve--finally--with a dollop of sour cream and the dill and cilantro leaves for garnish.

20.  If you are Russian, look up from the task and realize that the Cold War is over.

Braised Bambi

My father and my oldest brother like to hunt.  Every year they trek out into the Great Beyond together and manage to take out a dear, elk, or some hapless wild hog.  I'm really not the least bit jealous.  I tried the whole hunting thing back in my teens in an attempt for some father-daughter bonding.  All I really got out of it was a bruise from my elbow to my shoulder when I mistakenly grabbed my dad's 12-gauge shotgun instead of my 20-gauge.   Damn thing blasted me 20 feet out of the duck blind and onto to my rear-end in the middle of a Texan swamp.  My father still busts out laughing at the memory.  No thank you.   At heart I'm a city girl.   The closest I get to the great outdoors is living on a fairly wooded lot in the middle of suburbia.

Which is why it is a total surprise to me that I like wild game.   I may turn my nose up at getting out in the brush to hunt, but I'm the first one looking for hand-outs when there's a 12-point buck to be divvied up.  And even though I am a miserable hunter, my father dotes on me, so I'm usually the first beneficiary of his largess.  After each of his expeditions, there's usually a cooler of the kill waiting for me--conveniently already skinned, trimmed, and shrink-wrapped in plastic as though I picked it up at the Wegman's butcher shop.  My dad knows his girl.  This year I scored elk and a hind quarter roast of deer.   The elk was easy--rubbed it with garlic and threw it on the grill; deer is always more of a challenge.   If it isn't properly prepared, it can be tough, chewy, and, well,  taste like deer.  It's sort of an irony, but the fun part of wild game is getting it to taste like beef--unless you happen to be making squirrel, and then the challenge is getting squirrel to taste like chicken.  It will if you bake it slowly in cream of mushroom soup.  I recognize, of course, that no one will read ever read this blog again if I feature a recipe on squirrel, so instead, let me serve up some venison. 

Braised Venison
Adapted from a recipe by Bruce Reeder

1.  Get yourself a 4-5 pound venison roast.  I'm not sure how you do this if you don't hunt yourself or have a friend or family member that does.  You could start hanging out at shooting ranges or get yourself a job behind the gun counter at Walmart.  Join the NRA?  Become a Republican?  There are ways.

2.  Generously rub the roast with olive oil, and salt and pepper.  Lightly coat with flour.

3.  Generously coat the bottom of a large saute pan with olive oil, about 2 Tbs, and a similar amount of butter--one large pat. 

4.  When the butter begins to foam, pan sear the roast on all sides--about 3-4 minutes per side until lightly brown.

5.  In a crock pot, add the following:  one envelop dried onion soup mix, 1 can cream of mushroom soup, 1 can beef consomme.  Stop and think for a second how much sodium is in each of these items.  Put your salt shaker back in the cupboard.

6.  Add: 2 large onions, coarsely chopped; 4 carrots, peeled and diced; 2 stalks of celery, chopped; 1 cup burgundy wine; 1 Tbsp rosemary.

7.  Stir and mix well.  Add the seared roast.

8.  Turn the crock pot on to "low" and go do something else for about 8-10 hours.   You can hike, rake leaves, stack wood, go to the mall, or do a ton of laundry.  When you are done you can come home and find that Bambi literally falls off the bone and is floating in a thick hearty broth, that yeah, pretty much tastes like beef.  Thanks, Dad.

You've Come a Long Way, Baby

My husband is learning to cook and much to my amazement, he isn't half bad.  The fact that he has discovered the crock pot helps.  Cooking is a breeze when all you have to do is throw a bunch of stuff in one pot, turn it on, and walk away.  Still, he deserves credit for making progress. When he was single, his entire repetoire pretty much consisted entirely of oatmeal, minute rice with canned tuna, and for variety, he'd make a Lean Cuisines.   He could  also microwave a potato.  Garlic was  "ethnic."

The refrigerator of his bachelor days sported a bottle of French's mustard, a six-pack of Guinness, and lefover pizza.  Frankly, that refrigerator was the only way I knew he wasn't gay (not that there's anything wrong with that).  In my defense, he dressed really well, and collected antiques.  What can I say?  My prior boyfriend had thumb-tacked a Patriots bath towel to his window for a curtain, so the fact that my husband had insulated drapes that matched a Queen Anne wing-back armchair gave me pause.  I think I let out an audible sigh of relief when I opened that refrigerator door.   The poor guy didn't know how to make a sandwich, but thank the good Lord, he was straight!!

For the past 16 years, we've had a fairly egalitarian marriage:  I do all the cooking and he does everything else.  Unfortunately, with that crock pot he has recently caught on that cooking isn't as difficult as he feared.  He has discovered the joy of cranking up the tunes while you stir, chop, and saute--particularly if it means that someone else has to do the dishes, the laundry, the yard work,  pay the bills, and take the kids to soccer.  Damn.  I should take a hammer to that crock pot.  I've had it GOOD.

Slow Cooked Lamb & Beans
Courtesy of Wegman's  (Actually, I'm inferring such courtesy by the fact that they publish a quarterly recipe magazine ).

1.  Dust 4 lamb shanks with flour, salt, and pepper.  Wegman's features a pre-made "pan searing flour" that's really quite handy.  ( Oh come on, if I'm going to plagiarize Wegman's whole-cloth, the least I can do is make a few cheap plugs for some of their merchandise).

2.  Sear the lamb in a sauce pan coated with about 2 Tbsp of olive oil, heated over medium-high heat.  Brown on all sides--about 8-10 minutes.  Transfer the lamb to a crock pot.

3.  Add 8 oz of Wegman's cleaned and cut mirepoix to the pan--OR--save yourself about $4.00 and chop into a small dice: 2 carrots, 2 celery stalks, and one small onion.  ( The pre-cut mirepoix is outrageously expensive; I do have some ethical standards.  Of course, new cooks like my husband get intimidated when they see an ingredient in French, and Wegman's knows how to exploit such naivety.  Cunning buggers, those Wegman's folks.)  Saute until the vegetables are tender.

4.  Add one bay leaf and one cup of dry white wine.  Reduce until the mixture is a little thick.

6.  Add 6 Tbsp of flour.

7.  Transfer mixture to the crock pot with the lamb.  Add:  the zest of one lemon, the juice of one lemon, 3 cans (15.5 oz each) of cannelli beans, 1 28 oz can of roma tomatoes with basil, and 32 oz of chicken stock. 

8.  Cook on HIGH for 5-6 hours, or on LOW for 8-10 hours.  (A dish that only requires one temperature setting appeals to novice cooks.)

9.  Stir in 1 tsp rosemary and 2 tsp thyme just before serving.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Ooh and aah over your husband's efforts.  Tell the little lad how fetching he looks barefoot and in the kitchen.

Deck the Halls

I spent most of Sunday putting up the Christmas lights on the house.  Every year I practically kill myself in December trying to get ready for Christmas.  December is simply too short, so I've stretched the madness into November.  I'm not proud of it, but I've joined the retailers who start putting up their decorations right after Halloween.  It seems, however, that the Christmas spirits are not amused, and all I know is that no cooking got done.

Recipe for Take-out

1.  Wake up and remember that you stored the Christmas lights someplace other than the place that you have stored them for the last 10 years.  Smile smugly and silently congratulate yourself on your excellent memory.   Now wipe that grin off your face when you realize that you don't remember where that other place is.

2.  Two hours later discover the Christmas lights below the stairs where you have always stored them because you told yourself last year not to be an idiot and think that you would remember a new location next year.

3.  Dutifully take an inventory and plug in every single strand of lights to make sure they work.  Notice that one strand only lights up half way, and spend the next half hour looking for replacement bulbs.

4.  Spend another 30 minutes risking electrocution as you reinsert and rearrange bulbs on the recalcitrant strand to get it lit.  Give up and admit that you have to go to Walmart.

5.  Spend 30 minutes looking for your car keys.

6.  Enter Walmart committed to only buying replacement lights.  Walk out with several pointsettas, a couple of picture frames, peppermint candy canes, and a bag of Tostitos because you already sense some stress eating in your future.

7.  Get home and brag to your husband about your fiscal restraint because you passed on the 3-foot lighted candy canes that were only $2.97 each.

8.  Eat lunch-er, the bag of Tostitos--because by this time you have frittered away the entire morning.

The female/male connection

9.  Start arranging the basket lights on the bushes, and encourage your children to join you.   Realize how much they've grown when they start to snicker at your directions to properly line up the "male/female" connections.  Understand that they are still children when despite your directions they still wind up at the end with  female/female connections and have to flip the lights around--and then flip them yet again.

10.  Two hours later begin stringing the icicle lights from the porch.  Start cursing loudly when you discover that the plugs on the lights you just purchased don't connect with the lights you purchased 4 years ago.

11.  Take a deep breath.  Determine that if you move all of the new lights to right side of the porch, and all of the old lights to the left side, all the connections will marry up.  Spend 45 minutes rearranging the lights.  Laugh out loud when it all works, then bemoan the fact you got cocky when you discover that your extension cord is two inches too short.

12.  Spend 30 minutes looking for the right extension cord.  When you can't find it, give a fleeting thought to driving back to Walmart.  But because it ain't over until it's over, try one more time to rearrange the lights and the existing spaghetti bowl of extension cords.  Pump the air with your fist when you get it to work.

13.  Plug it all in to revel in the glow of the holidays.  But first look up with dismay to realize that one strand  of lights across the top of the porch is only half-way lit.  Repeat step 4 and shake your head in defeat on the drive back to Walmart.

14.  Walk out this time with enough electronic hardware to rebuild Apollo 13.  Run into an old colleague who doesn't recognize you at first either because you haven't showered or because you have a maniacal glint in your eye--probably both. 

15.  Get home and restring the last freaking strand of lights just as the sun is setting. 

16.  Plug it in.  The lights look absolutely, positively beautiful.  Start thinking that the whole day was oh-so-worth-it just as your husband asks you if you intend to leave the lights turned on because, hell, it isn't even Thanksgiving yet.--and by the way, "what's for dinner?"

17.  Shoot him a dirty look and let him know that oh yeah, he's buying take-out.  Fa la F'ing la.