Archive for the 'lamb' Category
If this wet, grey, hail-y weather continues, we are in for a whole year’s worth of cold weather comfort food. The smell of this shepherd’s pie bubbling made me crave crunchy leaves and Halloween.
To be honest shepherd’s pie isn’t normally in my repertoire, but as I was pondering what to do with this leftover roast lamb (hash was my first thought… my mom used to make the crispiest hash with leftover roast beef, potatoes and onions - like a wedge of burger and fries all crisped up and smothered in ketchup) I was simultaneously working on an article on meals you can freeze ahead. Shepherd’s pie is traditionally made with lamb, and I saw it as another opportunity to chip away at my stash of sweet potatoes while making it healthier in the process. Typically SP is made with raw ground meat, but it can just as easily be done with finely chopped leftover roast. Honestly, you could make a shepherd’s pie out of anything - a panful of veggies, even, or robust mushrooms with onions and garlic - then sprinkle a spoonful of flour overtop and add a cup of stock; bring it to a simmer to thicken and scrape up the browned bits from the pan, and pour into a baking dish and top with mashed potatoes. You really don’t need a recipe here, just a basic formula.
Come to think of it - a vegetarian version made with meaty portobello mushrooms, onions and garlic, and Guinness in place of the stock, would be just fab. More appropriate in October though, I think. Under normal circumstances, anyway.
Shepherd’s Pie with Sweet Potatoes
2 largeish sweet potatoes or 3 largeish russet potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
a drizzle of canola or olive oil
1 large onion, peeled and chopped
1 large carrot, peeled and chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 lb. ground lamb, lean beef or bison (or 2-3 cups chopped leftover roast)
1 cup sliced mushrooms (optional)
1 Tbsp. flour
1 tsp. chopped fresh or dry rosemary (optional)
1 cup beef, veggie, onion or chicken broth
2 Tbsp. tomato paste or ketchup
1 cup frozen peas
2 Tbsp. butter
1/4 cup(ish) milk
salt and pepper
Preheat oven to 375°F. To cook the potatoes you can either roast them in their skins in the oven for about an hour, microwave them whole in their skins (poke them with a fork first) or peel, chop and boil them until soft.
In a large pan, heat a drizzle of oil and sauté the onion and carrot over medium-high heat for about 5 minutes or until soft; add the garlic and meat and cook for another 5 minutes, until the meat is cooked through and the veg are starting to brown a little.
If you want to add mushrooms, set the meat mixture aside (transfer it to a bowl or something), heat a little more oil and sauté the mushrooms until they release their moisture and then the moisture cooks off and they start to brown. Return the meat mixture to the pan. Sprinkle the flour overtop and stir it around until it coats the meat a little, then add the rosemary, stock and tomato paste and stir until the mixture bubbles and thickens, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Stir in the peas.
Pour into a baking dish, making sure it only fills it half full, so there is room for the potatoes.
Peel (if necessary) and mash the potatoes with the butter, milk and salt and pepper. Spread over the meat mixture and bake for about 45 minutes, until bubbly.
Serves 6.
Per serving: 270 calories, 9.6 g total fat (2.8 g saturated fat, 4.4 g monounsaturated fat, 1 g polyunsaturated fat), 27.8 g protein, 17.9 g carbohydrate, 74.8 mg cholesterol, 2.5 g fiber. 32% calories from fat.
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June 11 2008 | freezable and lamb and leftovers and one dish | 2 Comments »
Stop rolling your eyes.
It would never in a million years occur to me to pop a leg of lamb in the oven on a plain old Monday night. But on Saturday morning I pulled the thing out of the freezer when I invited my sister over for dinner, and forgot about it when she went out of town and I decided to make Otsu instead. Which in turn got bumped for chicken shawarma. See what happens when I plan ahead?
So I spent altogether too much time this morning perusing recipes in an attempt to do something lamb-worthy; after all, the chunk of meat was $18. Then again, that’s less than ordering pizza, so what’s all the fuss about?
I was too mad at the rain to grill kebabs, and in the end decided that since it was a nice, even, bone-in piece of leg without the shank, I’d just straight-up roast it. Roasting a leg of lamb is very similar to roasting beef – the tricky part is the shape of it – the uneven thickness of the leg makes it difficult to roast evenly. At the thicker sirloin end and in the middle it’s very fleshy, but then it tapers down to the shank, which has very little meat. It’s common to end up with one end overcooked, while the middle beside the bone is still nearly raw.
The best way to combat this is to have the butcher remove the hipbone and aitchbone, then tie it with string to make it as uniform in shape as possible. Or you could buy a boned leg of lamb, which you can stuff, or cut and lay flat, or tie up and have it be pretty uniform.
It also helps to roast a leg of lamb on a rack in a roasting pan, so that the heat can circulate around it and the part resting on the hot pan doesn’t get overcooked. This also makes it easy to rotate the meat as it cooks, which will also help ensure it gets evenly cooked. I’ve heard that slow-cooking is a good method for lamb, but thought I’d save it for shanks or an awkward whole leg (as if that will likely happen this year).
So all I did was make a paste with 5 cloves of garlic, a twig of rosemary and a spoonful of olive oil and rubbed it all over the roast, then showered it with pepper and coarse salt. The oven was at 450F for the bagels Emily and I were making, so I took them out, put the roast in, and turned it down to 350F. This flash of high heat browns the exterior, caramelizing it a bit and adding flavour. (It doesn’t “seal in the juices”, as is commonly thought.)
It stayed in the oven for about an hour and a half, and I slid a pan of new potatoes tossed in oil underneath about halfway through. (I was too lazy to add garlic or anything else.) When the lamb was done and needed to rest for 10 minutes or so, I left the potatoes in and cranked the oven up to 450F again to make sure they were nice and dark and crispy.
Of course, lamb requires mint sauce. I do have a dusty bottle of the stuff on my shelf, but it occurred to me that this might make good use of the mint that’s currently taking over my lawn: 1 cup vinegar (whatever kind you think), 1/3 cup sugar and a big handful of torn fresh mint leaves. Shake it up in a jar.
I’m generally too lazy to make gravy. Whatever drippings are there are typically left to maybe be picked at, maybe get cleaned up and if I’m lucky end up in soup stock (if it’s chicken; minus the fat). I rarely roast beef and lamb. I do love the crispy bits and dark sludge that end up in the bottom of the roasting pan though, and so this time I spooned off as much fat as I could, and not wanting to flavour it with wine or dilute it with stock, instead I stirred in the tiniest dab of butter (about half a teaspoon) with a fork, working all that yumminess off the bottom and sides of the pan. My intention, actually, was to (ingeniously, I thought) wilt a bag of spinach in the small amount of buttery drippings, but when I pulled the bag out of the fridge I realized it had been in there longer than I thought.
So I dribbled the few tablespoons of what amounted to pure meat heaven over the lamb, and we forgot to use the mint sauce altogether.
As it turns out, this was one of the easiest meals I’ve done. Seriously. Why are roasts always reserved for fancy occasions?
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June 09 2008 | lamb | 5 Comments »
Every time people I know move, I am the eager recipient of boxes of old cooking magazines they may have stored in their basements. These then get transported into my basement, or my parents’ basement, to be dusted off and moved again when we do. Mike loves this.
Likewise, I am always the one lugging magazines out of church and garage sales for a quarter apiece. Then they get stored in our basement/garage/bedroom until I have a chance to flip through them and pull out the most interesting pages. Their final stage of decomposition is when said pages are piled into my big yellow milk crate for sorting, and the rest gets recycled.
As I may have mentioned, my parents are moving, so a box of Saveur magazines have been returned to their rightful owner. I stumbled upon this recipe for ground lamb and peas in yogurt: aha! a use for that chub of ground lamb and unreasonably huge bag of peas taking up prime real estate in my freezer.
Keema matar calls for a technique known as tarka: which refers to sauteeing whole spices - in this case coriander, cumin and chiles—in clarified butter (also known as ghee) to boost flavour. Of course this does not require you to go purchase a jar of ghee; my plan was to simply use melted butter and perhaps scoop the suds off the top. But to be truthful, my enthusiasm for this dish waned with every step as I plodded through the instructions. I thought I had garam masala; I did not. I had to puree the ginger and garlic with turmeric and garam masala and water to make a watery paste. When it came time to do the tarka, I found I had exhausted my stash of cumin seed, and my coriander was missing (this could be due to one of W’s favorite pastimes: to throw my spices out the bathroom window) but I soldiered on. I threw in the towel when I realized I didn’t have chiles de árbol, only ancho and guillano, and who knows if they are similar? I plopped in a spoonful of curry paste and was done with it.
The method - saute onions, add ginger-garlic paste and tomato paste, cook to caramelize (? the onions should be caramelized before the moisture goes in) and then add the lamb and cook it, too, was odd. I’d have done it the other way - cook the onions and lamb, then add the ginger-garlic and spices and tomato paste. I’m not sure what the benefit is of the other method - it was difficult to tell when the lamb was cooked in that mixture, and impossible to pour off the excess fat - but I’m sure if someone with Indian cooking expertise did it it would turn out beautifully.
And actually, Mike thinks it did. I was ho-hum about it, but I found him picking out of the pan after dinner, and he said “this is one of the best things you’ve ever made! It’s like an Indian Hamburger Helper.”
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April 14 2008 | lamb and one dish | 3 Comments »
In Lethbridge, in the dark to honour Earth Hour.
It was fantastic. I was in Lethbridge to cook and eat with the wonderful folks who were the highest bidders on a private dinner/cooking class with me that was auctioned off for the CBC Petro-Canada Food Bank Drive at Christmas. I asked what they would like to make and they were interested in learning to make fresh mozzarella - something I hadn’t done before. The process was simple but we tiptoed through it, skeptical that it was actually going to turn into cheese in the end, and it did! Although we were shocked at how little 2 L of milk produced; one handful-sized ball, which we managed to squeeze enough slices out of to make this salad layered with tomatoes and fresh basil:
Here’s how you do it:
Dissolve 1 tsp. citric acid into 2 L of cold milk (we used homo), briskly stirring it with a whisk in a largish pot. Set it over medium-low heat and warm until it reaches 100F, or just slightly warmer than body temperature. Remove from heat.
Crush 1/8 of a rennet tablet and dissolve into 2 Tbsp. cool water. Add this in a thin stream, whisking constantly, to the warmed milk. Stir for about a minute, then stop. Let it sit for 10 minutes.
Using a slotted spoon, scoop out the curds into a small microwave-safe bowl, pressing out as much of the whey as you can.
Microwave for 1 minute (this will coax out a little more whey; just pour it off) and then plop it out onto a clean countertop and start to fold and stretch it. It will be almost too hot to handle, but will cool to warm quickly. Pull and stretch it until it’s smooth, then shape into a ball and put in a bowl of cold water until firm.
Pavlova
Whether you choose one big Pavlova or individual Pavlovas, they are simpler than you’d think to make, yet elaborate enough to make an impressive dessert, if that’s the reaction you’re going for.
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 tsp. cornstarch
6 large egg whites
1 tsp. white vinegar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 cup whipping cream
Fresh raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and/or sliced strawberries, peaches, plums, apricots, kiwi or whatever fruit you like
Additional sugar for tossing with fruit (optional)
Preheat oven to 250° F and line a large baking sheet with foil or parchment. Set aside about a tablespoon of the sugar, and stir the cornstarch into the rest.
In a large bowl, beat the egg whites with an electric mixer until soft peaks form. Gradually add the sugar mixture, beating until the mixture holds stiff, glossy peaks. Beat in vinegar and vanilla.
To make one large Pavlova, spoon the meringue onto the baking sheet and spread out with the bottom of a spoon to form a 9”-10” circle with a slight indent in the middle and raised edges, like a nest. To make individual Pavlovas, spoon 8-10 mounds of meringue about an inch apart on the baking sheet. Bake for 1 to 1 1/4 hours, until crisp but still soft inside. If the meringues aren’t crisp, turn the oven off and leave them inside for another hour.
Transfer Pavlova(s) to a rack and cool completely. Beat the cream with the remaining tablespoon of sugar until soft peaks form. Mound into the middle of the cooled Pavlova(s) and top with fruit.
Serves 8-10.
Crème brulée has an unshakable reputation as the penultimate fancy dessert, one you can guage the quality of a restaurant based on, and one uncommonly made at home. But truly, it is one of the simplest desserts you can make. All you do is whisk together egg yolks, sugar and cream, pour it into cups, and bake it. At Williams-Sonoma they have 1 L tetra packs of crème brulée for something like $22, and I’m constantly gobsmacked every time I go in there and see people buying them by the basketload. That’s the easy part! If there’s any trick to it, it’s baking the custards in a water bath and bruléeing the surface, but even that part is easy - you don’t need to have a torch (although it is fun), all you need to do is scatter the surface with sugar and run it under the broiler for a minute or two. Because they are chilled before this part, this is the ideal make-ahead dessert if you’re making a special dinner.
Crème Brulée
6 large egg yolks
6 Tbsp. sugar
1 1/2 cups heavy (whipping) cream or 18% coffee cream
1/2 tsp. good-quality vanilla (I used Madagascar vanilla bean paste, in which you can see the teeny seeds from the vanilla pod)
sugar, for sprinkling on top
In a bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and sugar. Whisk in the cream and vanilla.
Divide among 6 small ramekins, and put them into a roasting pan or 9″x13″ pan; pour water in so that the water comes about halfway up the sides of the ramekins. This will sort of insulate them so that they cook gently and evenly.
Bake for about 40 minutes, until the custards are set but still just slightly jiggly in the middle (you’ll get a feel for this!). Take them out, let them cool and then refrigerate for a few hours or overnight, until nice and cold.
Sprinkle an even layer of sugar over each dish and caramelize with a torch or transfer to a cookie sheet and place under the broiler in the oven for about 2 minutes, just until the sugar is caramelized and golden. Turn the sheet around if you need to to help them caremelize evenly. Refrigerate again, or just let them sit on the countertop while you eat dinner or make coffee, just until the sugar is set and crackly.
Serves 6.
The drive home was longer than I anticipated, having blithely missed some turn at Fort McLeod and not realized it until I reached Pincher Creek. After turning around, driving back to F.M. and then finding highway #2 North, a snowstorm hit that lasted the entire drive back (almost 2 hours) to Calgary - it was one of those storms that makes you feel like you’re driving through an asteroid field, making it impossible to tell how fast you’re going or how far away that rig is in front of you.
But totally worth it.
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March 30 2008 | cheese and dessert and lamb and leftovers and sweet stuff | 1 Comment »
Happy Food on a Stick Day! In honor of this beloved holiday (honestly, who comes up with these? and to what panel do they apply for approval?) we did all sorts of food on a stick this morning at CBC. The favorite were the lamb kebabs. (OK, the bacon wrapped peroghies on a stick were probably the favorite, but the lamb was well-received too.)
I made sure there was some left over. These are really just a meatball mixture made with ground lamb instead of beef (although you could use beef, or half and half) and spiced with cumin, garlic, ginger, cinnamon, with currants and crumbled feta stirred in. You could turn it into meatballs if you like, or take a small handful and shape it into a sort of log around a bamboo skewer. Grill them, broil them, or cook them in a skillet in a little olive oil - awkward, but the only option when you’re working on a hot plate set on a file cabinet outside a studio.
Either way, they’re perfect to dip into garlicky tzatziki, or to stuff a pita along with chopped tomato, cucumber, purple onion, and a big glop of tzatziki.
Greek Lamb Kebabs
1 lb. ground lamb or lean ground beef (or half and half)
1 small onion, peeled and grated
1/2 cup soft bread crumbs (about 1 slice of bread), bulgur or couscous
1/2 cup crumbled feta (optional)
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 large egg
2-4 Tbsp. currants or chopped raisins
1 Tbsp. grated fresh ginger
1 tsp. cumin
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. salt
olive or canola oil, for brushing
Preheat oven to 400° F. Soak some bamboo skewers in water for at least 10 minutes to prevent them from burning when you cook the kebabs.
Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl. Shape handfuls of the meat mixture into flattened sausages about 3” long around the ends of the skewers. Place on a rimmed cookie sheet, brush with olive oil and roast, turning often, until cooked through.
Makes 12 kebabs.
Per kebab: 112 calories, 4.2 g total fat (1.4 g saturated fat, 1.6 g monounsaturated fat, 0.5 g polyunsaturated fat), 13.3 g protein, 4.5 g carbohydrate, 65 mg cholesterol, 0.2 g fiber. 34% calories from fat
Tzatziki
Regular plain yogurt, preferably thick Greek yogurt, is far superior to the runny low fat or fat free varieties, many of which depend on gelatin as a stabilizer. Even full-fat Greek yogurt is fairly low in fat, especially when compared to mayo or sour cream.
1/2 English cucumber, unpeeled
1 – 2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 cups good quality plain yogurt, preferably Greek or Balkan-style
salt & pepper to taste
squeeze of lemon juice (optional)
drizzle of olive oil (optional)
Grate the cucumber with a box grater onto a double thickness of paper towel. Gather up the cucumber in the towel and squeeze out as much excess water as you can. In a medium bowl, stir together the cucumber, garlic, yogurt, salt and pepper. If you like, add a squeeze of lemon and/or drizzle of olive oil. Let it sit in the fridge for a few hours or overnight; the garlic flavor will intensify the longer it sits. Makes 2 1/2 - 3 cups.
Per 1/3 cup: 45 calories, 1 g total fat (0.6 g saturated fat, 0.3 g monounsaturated fat, 0.1 g polyunsaturated fat), 3.5 g protein, 5.6 g carbohydrate, 3.7 mg cholesterol, 0.3 g fiber. 20% calories from fat
These squares I made just because I wanted to do something other than make smoothies with the bag of tiny frozen wild blueberries in the freezer, and because I have a baby shower to go to on Sunday; it’s always a good idea for me to have reason to pawn off the leftovers.
(Low Fat) Blueberry, Lemon & Coconut Squares
These are perfect to make ahead and stash in the freezer; slicing them frozen will ensure a clean cut.
Base:
1/4 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup sugar
1 scant cup all-purpose or whole wheat flour
pinch salt
Topping:
1 cup sugar
2 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
pinch salt
1 large egg
1 large egg white
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries, raspberries or cranberries
1/2 cup shredded coconut, sweetened or unsweetened
icing sugar for sprinkling (optional)
Preheat oven to 350°F.
In a medium bowl, stir together the butter and sugar until creamy. Add flour and salt and stir until well combined and crumbly.
Press into the bottom of an 8” x 8” pan that has been sprayed with nonstick spray. Bake for 8-10 minutes, until just barely golden around the edges.
In the same bowl (no need to wash it), combine sugar, flour, baking powder and salt. Add egg, egg white and lemon juice and stir until well blended and smooth.
Sprinkle the berries and coconut evenly over the base, and pour the lemon filling over top. Bake for 40 minutes, until golden and set. Cool completely in the pan on a wire rack before cutting or freezing. If you like, sprinkle with icing sugar before serving. Makes 16 squares.
Per Square: 130 calories, 3.3 g fat (1.9 g saturated fat, 1 g monounsaturated fat, 0.2 g polyunsaturated fat), 24 g carbohydrates, 21 mg cholesterol, 1.6 g protein, 0.7 g fiber. 23% calories from fat
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March 28 2008 | appetizers and cookies & squares and lamb and snacks and sweet stuff | 2 Comments »
