Friday, August 12, 2011

They Call Me Mellow Yellow

Brick was close, but a little off. I love lamb. Love, love, love, love, LOVE lamb. It may be sacrilegious to many of my friends, but in the meat kingdom, I hold lamb in higher esteem than bacon. SRSLY. Love lamb.

So in restarting this blog, I definitely wanted to try some new lamb dishes. I’ve made some delicious racks of lamb in my day and I have been known to turn the occasional Trader Joe's leg of lamb into some great gyro filling. My friend Susanna even submitted one of her favorite lamb recipes for me to try (and that recipe will debut at a slightly later date). But this – this was new.

I was on Allrecipes.com surfing around and they had a section of recipes dedicated to the start of Ramadan. In my past life as a retail slave, Middle Eastern Arabs would come and shop with us for the month leading up to Ramadan. I met some wonderful people during those visits and the concept of Ramadan was always interesting to me. I think the most notable aspect is that it involves not only fasting from food, but from anything passing the lips. As someone who drinks a couple of liters of water a day, the thought of abstaining from any beverage from sun up to sun down is rather impressive.

The best part of Ramadan though (at least, to a foodie like me), is the feasting that occurs after the sun goes down. The lunar month seems to be both deprivation and excess and I was incredibly excited that Allrecipes.com had a section completely devoted to Middle Eastern/Mediterranean/Arabic dishes in celebration.

I was browsing and found a couple of bread recipes that I set aside for future blogs. And then I found the lamb. Oh, lamb. I love you so very, very much. Your delicious flavor that some may find gamey tickles my taste buds and makes my heart dance. (I was a little on the  thrilled side to find this recipe.)

Added to the benefit of making a lamb dish solely for the sake of lamb, this dish had saffron.

My first encounter with saffron was my sophomore year of college. Before a dance that year, my date and I had dinner at McCormick & Schmick’s with several friends. One of the appetizers listed (and promptly ordered) was mussels in a saffron cream sauce. Had lightning struck me down at the end of the meal, I would have died incredibly happy. For those who haven’t tried saffron, I’m hard-pressed to describe it. The best attempt I can make is the effect of the taste: it makes my tongue want to complete celebratory cartwheels while my body as a whole wants to curl up and cuddle with anything that may be in the immediate vicinity.

You can imagine my squee when I found Tunisian Lamb with Saffron.

A fair warning: this is not a cheap meal. The leg of lamb I found (My grocer didn’t have cubed lamb stew meat, which would likely be cheaper. I’m going to have to start frequenting the Farmer’s Market.) ran $18. My little jar of saffron? $21. Ouch. But at the same time, the recipe makes enough to feed four and it’s delicious. So the overall cost is about $45 (with the other ingredients) – $11.25 per person is not too shabby, especially considering how much we spend per person when we eat out. And it’s lamb… with saffron.

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And all-in-all, it’s a really simple recipe to make. All of the required ingredients are pictured above. The first step for me (which I didn’t document) was the cubing of the lamb. Working around the bone in the leg was a little challenging, but I got 2-3 lbs of meat (ok, I didn’t follow the recipe exactly) that I could use for the meal. My cat was thrilled to have the remnants on the leg bone.

The first real order of business was browning the meat.

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My kitchen was already smelling amazing at this point.

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Getting there.

With the lamb browned, it was time to add the other ingredients – most specifically, the one that had been on my mind all week:

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I’m not being cheeky with the plastic bag – the jar of saffron comes with this tiny plastic bag of the saffron threads inside. I had just enough for this recipe (with about 1/4 of a teaspoon left over). I think one of the things that fascinates me about saffron, aside from its taste, is its color transformation. You start off with red threads, but it colors the food a vibrant yellow.

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And of course, at this point my mouth was watering and I was burning my tongue attempting to sample a chunk of lamb. Here the recipe instructs the addition of butter and specifies to simmer the meal until the sauce reached a desired consistency. I… took a few liberties at this point.

After I added the butter, my Paula Deen side came out. “That’s not enough butter!” And another tablespoon was added. Stirring the mixture for about five minutes, it wasn’t reaching the consistency I wanted (thick, so I could hang on to every drop of that saffron-y goodness). So I went the cream sauce route and added about 1/4 cup of heavy whipping cream. (Yes, I keep heavy whipping cream in my fridge as a kitchen staple.)

The sauce was still taking a bit of time to reduce and I didn’t want to overcook the lamb, so I came up with the following solution:

Photo 8

Now I could boil the sauce to reduce it faster without making the lamb completely tough.

And all of a sudden – it was dinner.

I don’t usually follow the instructions for garnishing, but in this instance, I saved the 1/4 cup of onions and I had the parsley chopped and waiting. This is a good idea. This is a very good idea. Sprinkling both over the top of the finished dish set the tastes off beautifully.

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Yummmmmmm….

Even better though was remembering the lemon. This dish with a tiny bit of lemon juice squirted over it is superb. I will definitely, without hesitation or concern for cost, make this recipe again. It made my taste buds rhumba.

The only thing I’d change? I’d make sure to make a bread as well to go with it so I could sop up the wonderful sauce that’s left over. (I’m half British. We sop. It’s what we do.) It could also be really delicious over rice.

We inhaled this meal. There are only three of us (Tiff, John, and me) but we ate well and we ate gluttonously.

2 comments:

  1. You always were a talented writer. I don't even care about the recipe because I so enjoyed all of your descriptions. I'm so glad you're blogging again.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you, Carrie! It feels good to be blogging again. :)

    ReplyDelete