We Needed a Celebration

It's been a long time since we had a get-together at our house. Spring was busy: I'm volunteering a couple days a week, I traveled to Philly to watch Ellie graduate, and we had a few health problems along the way. We needed a reason to celebrate at home. Ann set it up, inviting Rob and Dyce and Michelle and Andreas for dinner.

Pregaming with Chenin Blanc

Superstar Wine: Anjou Blanc
Chenin from Thibaut Boudignon

Whipped Feta with Spicy Honey and Pine Nuts

We had been saving a magnum of Anjou Blanc from Thibaud Boudignon for just such an occasion. He is a winemaker who came from obscurity to global reknown (at least among sommeliers) in a blink, now making some of the best wines in the Loire. These are not old school wines, however. They are precise and angular and suit my palate to a tee. Although he is best known for his outstanding Savennières, I prefer his base level Anjou Blanc for its simplicity and laser-focused acidity.

I let the wine guide the appetizer course, selecting a cheese dish that would be a great foil for the incredible acidity of the Boudignon wine. Over the years I have done many versions of baked feta and whipped goat cheese, but never whipped feta.

For garnishes, I made spicy honey (half a cup of honey and a tablespoon of sambal oelek) and toasted a handful of pine nuts. I chose to garnish with honey expressly to echo the honey and beeswax aromas and flavors of the Chenin Blanc.

Whipped Feta

For the whipped feta, I decided to add 20% goat cheese by weight to help loosen the feta which I was afraid would be too grainy whipped alone. I was quite happy with the results as apparently were all the others—none was left at the end of the evening.

400 grams of excellent sheep's milk feta

100 grams of fresh goat cheese

squeeze of lemon juice

drizzle of extra virgin olive oil

Soften both cheeses at room temperature. Place both in a food processor and process until whipped, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.

The raw whipped cheese tasted flat so I squeezed in the juice of an end of a lemon that I had left on the cutting board from making lemon slices for the chicken. I drizzled in an equal amount of olive oil; call it a tablespoon of each. The feta is salty enough; the whip did not need more salt.

Setting the Table: First Time in a Long Time

Ann and I went back and forth on the menu for a few days. At first, she wanted a reprise of a chicken tagine that I made some years ago, actually, an entire meal that I had made before. I resisted repeating myself, feeling that it is a cop out of sorts. But then she changed her mind to simple roasted chicken on white beans.

She was dead set on the tomato salad flavored with fennel pollen from the menu that I did not want to replicate. She talks about that salad often, but it's funny how I barely remember the dishes (so many thousands) that I have cooked. Thankfully, this blog is a repository of dishes that I have made, so there is a record even if I no longer recall them.

Roasted Chicken
with White Beans, Artichokes, and Garlic

The orginal roast chicken, as I conceived it, had no white beans. But I added them to subsequent iterations because something magical happens when you roast chicken on top of them. As always, quality matters. Use the best beans you can find. In this case, I used yellow eye beans from Rancho Gordo. These are among my favorite all purpose white beans ever and a stalwart at the restaurant.

Roasted Chicken with White Beans, Artichokes, and Garlic

6 heads of garlic, broken into cloves and peeled

3 lemons, sliced

1 pound of dried white beans, cooked

3 400-gram cans artichoke hearts

1 bunch of Italian parsley, destemmed and roughly chopped

2 large sprigs of rosemary, destemmed

drizzle of extra virgin olive oil

12 chicken thighs

salt

pepper

Mix the garlic, lemon slices, white beans, artichoke hearts, parsley, and rosemary with a drizzle of olive oil. Season as necessary. Place the mixture in the bottom of a roasting pan. Toss the chicken thighs with salt and pepper and arrange on the bed of vegetables. Roast in a hot oven (400F) until the chicken skin is crisp, about two hours. Check the beans occasionally. If they are drying out, moisten them with a little bean broth or chicken stock.

Tomatoes with Fennel Pollen and Shallots

Nobody needs a recipe for this simple tomato salad that is as surprisingly delicious as it is easy to make. It is merely a mixture of halved grape tomatoes, minced shallots, fennel pollen, lemon juice, olive oil, and salt, all to taste. 

Shout Out to El Mentridano

Ann and I, we are fans of light bodied reds with good acidity and some structure, wines that let their aromatics do the talking. While we are not fans of the usually overripe Spanish Garnacha, we both agree that El Mentridano, a high-altitude, lightly expressed Garnacha from Méntrida, near Madrid, is delightful. It offers a nose of cranberries, cherries, black tea, and a slight earthiness, all positives in our book. Color is light and tannins are polished, all backed by an attractive sour cherry acidity that keeps the wine vibrant. It reminds me of Nebbiolo in many ways. We had real problems, likely bottle shock, with this wine about six months ago, but after sitting in the rack for that period, it is back to normal. We must buy more—it is an indispensable summer red that pairs with a vast range of foods.

Herding Cats Again: Impossible to Get Everyone to Cooperate

Ann Made Her Delightful Summer Pudding (Berries and Brioche)

Michelle Made Her Best Batch Yet of Lemon Bars

We needed a night to sit back with friends and catch up. The simple menu is just what we needed, tasty and yet easy to prep in advance, with zero à la minute cooking that let us enjoy the company of our guests.

July 4 Celebration

Each year, we celebrate the Fourth of July and the country where we live. I am not a political person, but this year, I am decidedly not feeling at all patriotic, nor am proud of certain things that are happening in our country. Still, we persevered with our celebration in the hopes that this country will right itself. Right is a poor choice of verbs in this instance. Perhaps I should have chosen the verb center.

We invited Rob, Dyce, Dyce's parents who are in town from Italy, and new friend Brad to throw down with us.

Lyn, Brad, Neal, Dyce, Ann, and Rob

The menu ended up as a pseudo-Greek affair. I like burgers for the 4th, but had a hankering for my lamb burgers which blow beef burgers out of the water. From there, it was not a stretch to want to pair the burgers with tzatziki and horiatiki. But then, Ann wanted orzo too, so I combined the orzo and horiatiki to create a cold pasta salad. Then I wanted an appetizer I could make in advance, so after a bit of head scratching, decided on tiropitakia, cheese-filled phyllo pastries. Ann volunteered to make her delicious berry and brioche summer pudding and asked me to make a sorbet. We settled on lemon-thyme and the menu was complete. The recipe for the sorbet is in a separate post.

Some wine was drunk; some food was eaten; some fun was had!

Lamb Burger with Feta and Pine Nuts

I love my lamb burgers and this year, for a change, I recorded a rough recipe because I have had requests for it in the past.

Lamb Burger Recipe

This recipe scales well so I have expressed it in terms of seasonings for a single pound of lamb. In reality, I made a 4-pound batch and I eyeballed everything. It is always a good idea when mixing a batch of forcemeat like this, to cook a tiny bit and adjust the seasonings to your liking. Also, this mix gains flavor in the refrigerator so plan on mixing everything a day or even two in advance. I scaled out six-ounce burgers, my preferred size.

Per pound of ground lamb:

1/4 c dry white wine (substitute red wine or water or stock)

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon dried Greek oregano

1 pinch crushed red pepper flakes

1/4 teaspoon Pimentón de la Vera agridulce (smoked paprika)

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1/4 teaspoon coarsely ground pepper

3 cloves garlic, minced (I used way more than this!)

small handful of toasted pine nuts

2 ounces sheep’s milk feta, crumbled

optional, if you have spice grinder:

pinch dried rosemary, finely ground

pinch dried thyme, finely ground 

Procedure:

Mix liquids and solids well to distribute salt and spices.

Add lamb and gently mix. Using hands is best.

Refrigerate overnight or two nights.

Patty into burgers or shape into kefta (oval meatballs)

Cook to desired temperature. I like medium rare.

Tiropitakia and Tzatziki

Tiropitakia Ready for Oven

Our appetizer was the tiropitakia (little cheese pies) that you see in photos above. I just went with my gut which said to mix chopped kalamata olives, chopped marinated sun-dried tomatoes, oregano, lemon zest, and grated pecorino cheese with a tub of ricotta cheese. For savory pastries like this, I brush the phyllo layers with olive oil (and for sweet pastries, I use butter). I brushed the tops of the little triangles with olive oil and sprinkled them with oregano and coarse salt before baking until browned in a moderate oven. A recipe for tzatiki is in this post.

Orzo Salad

The pasta salad was simple. I mixed a bunch of olive oil, lemon juice, kalamata brine, and oregano (my usual horiatiki dressing) in a large bowl. Then I cut the horiatiki vegetables and cheese smaller than usual, because otherwise, they would dwarf the small orzo pasta. The usual suspects are: tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, and feta. I omitted peppers because I didn't feel like I wanted them. So there.

I put all the salad ingredients into the dressing for about an hour to marinate. The red onions, I sliced very thin and soaked in several changes of cold water to mellow them out. In the morning, I par-cooked the orzo a couple minutes shy of being done, knowing that it would finish softening in the refrigerator. This is a useful technique for all pasta salads. After cooling the pasta under running water, it went into the vegetables and I tasted for salt. Salt this salad carefully because the kalamata brine, olives, and feta are already salty.

Into the fridge to mellow for a few hours the salad went. Just before serving the appetizers, I put the salad in a serving bowl and garnished with the onions. Just before serving dinner, I mixed everything well to distribute the onions and redistribute the dressing.

Ann's Beautiful Summer Berry and Brioche Pudding

Lemon-Thyme Sorbet with Summer Berry Pudding

Loubia with Lamb Kefta

Andreas and Michelle went to Iceland just before we went to Italy so we haven't seen them in a hot minute. Our schedules finally allowed us to get together to see their absolutely stunning pictures. Iceland is very near the top of our list of places to visit in the next couple of years. I can hardly wait.

Loubia with Lamb Kefta

Andreas likes to cook and likes to pick my brain to learn new things. This time, he wanted to learn about spicing and I believe he mentioned Moroccan food specifically. At the same time, Ann seemed fixated on lamb and white beans, so I decided to do a bean stew common to the Maghreb, a dish called various things in various locales.

Loubia is a stew of white beans that I have encountered often. I know it in French as tagine d'haricots blancs or cassoulet algérienne. I also know that Andreas loves my cassoulet. And I also know that because it requires hours in the oven, it is not a dish that I can show him how to make right before dinner.

So what to do?

I decided keep on with the slow-cooked beans, but show him how to make two condiments for the beans, a red sauce and a green sauce. The red sauce was my version of harissa (red chiles, cumin, coriander, fennel, caraway, cinnamon, salt, garlic, lemon juice, and olive oil). The green sauce was my version of chermoula, an analog of chimichurri (parsley, cilantro, lemon zest, coriander, fennel, salt, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil). Chermoula is a typical condiment for fish, but I love it with meat in the same way that I love gremolata, salsa verde, or chimichurri with meat.

Long-cooked and mild dishes such as this loubia can often benefit from a zesty, acidic sauce to help wake up the taste buds. Also helpful is a bright green salad with an acidic dressing, such as the one I made from arugula, julienne of apple and fennel, and a tangy vinaigrette made with Sherry vinegar.

Lamb Kefta in the Classic Shape

First thing in the morning, I put my beans that had soaked overnight in lightly salted water on to par-cook for 90 minutes. I used my old stand-by beans, Steuben Yellow Eye beans from Rancho Gordo. Into the pot, I tossed a large sprig each of rosemary, sage, and thyme which would subtly flavor the beans.

Meanwhile, I got busy making the kefta (kofta, kafta, kufta: your choice). Because I was going to serve the beans and kefta with two assertive sauces, I did not highly season the lamb as I often do. The seasonings are a lot of garlic, a decent bit of a mild paprika, some salt, and a bit of coriander, cumin, and dried chile flakes. All the seasonings I mixed into a slurry with a couple of eggs and some white wine (definitely a no-no in the Arab world; substitute any stock or cream). Then I added a couple pounds of ground lamb and a half a cup of rolled oats.

I typically do add some type of starch to my meatballs and meatloaf to loosen the texture of the cooked product so that it is not super dense. I have used panko, panade (bread soaked in cream), cooked rice, and raw rolled oats all to success. Because I always have them on hand, I use rolled oats most frequently, a bonus if you have guests who are gluten-free.

After mixing the forcemeat (with the best tool of all, my hands), I put it in the refrigerator to settle and so that the oats could start to absorb the liquid and bind the mixture. When the beans were just about at the end of their 90-minute par-cook, I shaped the kefta, diced a leek and a large carrot, and minced half a bulb of garlic.

Then it was standard cassoulet procedure from there: brown the meat (the kefta), cook the aromatic vegetables in the same pan scraping up all the brown bits (the fond) from the bottom of the pan, drain the beans and save the cooking liquid for soup, mix the vegetables with the drained beans and season, put a layer of beans in the cocotte, add the meats, top with the remaining beans, fill with a deeply-flavored meat stock to just cover the beans, and finally bake in a slow oven, replenishing the stock as necessary and punching down the crust every hour or so.

While I Cooked, Ann Set the Table and Chose Utensils and Plates

I wanted to have something to snack on while the girls chatted and Andreas and I made the harissa and chermoula. I decided on a baked feta to take advantage of the oven since it would be going anyway in finishing the loubia. This couldn't be easier to make by whipping up a roasted red pepper sauce in the blender and layering it under and over slices of feta.

The roasted red pepper sauce is a pint jar of roasted red peppers, a couple tablespoons of my homemade harissa, a couple tablespoons of the intense umami-bomb estratto di pomodoro (Sicilian tomato paste), a couple cloves of garlic (minced), and a touch of salt. Ten seconds of whirring in the blender and it's done.

I also cut up some olives (Castelvetrano) and toasted some pine nuts for garnish. I stole a bit of parsley from the bunch that I picked for chermoula as an additional garnish.

Baked Feta in Roasted Red Pepper Sauce
Olives, Pine Nuts, and Parsley for Garnish

A Couple of Italian Girls

Loubia with Lamb Kefta
Loubia is Generally Saucier; I Made This Just Like Cassoulet

Arugula Salad with Apples, Fennel, and Sherry Vinaigrette
Loubia with Harissa and Chermoula

A Vegetarian Fourth

Almost two years post restaurant, I rarely get the urge to cook full meals any longer. But on July 4th, I felt like I wanted to cook a really simple meal that we could enjoy on the front porch with our vegetarian neighbors, taking full advantage of Oregon's delightful summer weather.

I always associate the Fourth with watermelon and Ann had been asking me to make lentil burgers for a week or two, so I decided to build a meal around that: lentil burgers, pita, hummus, arugula, tzatziki, and a watermelon salad. I started around 7:30 in the morning with some really easy tasks, mixing up some pita dough, making tzatziki, and knocking out a quick watermelon salad.

About 30 minutes before neighbors Pat and Mary Jo came over, I baked the pita, keeping them warm under a towel, while simultaneously frying the lentil burgers which then went into the oven after I turned it off, to keep warm for dinner.

Pat and Mary Jo

"What can we bring?"

We started the evening with a stack of warm pita, a bowl of hummus, and cocktails of pomegranate liqueur and Prosecco. I think that if that was all we had to eat, we would have been happy chatting away on the front porch, hearing all the neighbors doing the same on their nearby porches.

Starters: Pita, Hummus, Pomegranate and Prosecco

I love hummus. Just ask anyone who ever worked for me at the restaurant. I probably ate it every day for lunch. I eat it less frequently now, cooking less, but I still love it. Although you can't see it, this hummus has a lot of green olives ground up with the chickpeas. I also use a drizzle of sesame oil rather than tahini. Same flavor, but easier.

For this batch destined for company, I went to the trouble of peeling all the chickpeas, six pounds of them. For regular batches, I don't peel them. The texture is really much better if you peel them, but I'm not working that hard on a daily basis. I am no longer a restaurant chef judged by the slightest nuances in food. I'm now a guy who values time with people more than time in the kitchen.

Hummus with Olives and a Drizzle of Olive Oil

Lentil burgers, black bean burgers, squash cakes: I have a love affair with fried vegetable patties of all sorts. For these, I cooked the lentils with garlic and herbs, drained them, added eggs, sautéed mirepoix of carrot, celery, and shiitake mushrooms, fresh herbs (rosemary, sage, thyme), and panko. I pattied them out and put them in the fridge to firm up before frying.

Lentil Burgers; Local Sauvignon Blanc

Who doesn't love arugula tossed with some lemon juice, olive oil, and salt? It's one of the greatest and simplest salads.

I couldn't celebrate the Fourth without watermelon, so I made a really quick watermelon salad with feta cheese, red onions, mint from the back yard, olives, olive oil, and red wine vinegar. Thank goodness for the smart plant breeders who came up with the infertile (seedless) triploid hybrid watermelons that are so delicious and easy to work with!

Call it tzatziki, cacik, or tarator, it's pretty much the same yogurt and cucumber condiment all over the Mediterranean. I've made a few thousand pounds of it in my life, always preferring the flavor of red wine vinegar in mine, rather than lemon juice. Herbs vary with my mood, but almost always include oregano, this fresh from my back yard.

Arugula, Watermelon Salad, Tzatziki

Behind the Scenes: Frying Lentil Burgers

Not sure why people think pita is hard to make. It's among the easiest flatbreads. I don't have a recipe per se, keying off the amount of water to give me final yield. One cup of water will incorporate enough flour to make 8 pita. Salt, yeast, and olive oil round out the dough, which I let rise twice before shaping into balls. After the balls rested for 20 minutes, I patted and rolled them out and into the very hot oven onto a hot sheet tray they went, three at a time, about two minutes on one side and another minute on the other.

These pita are very similar to the flatbreads and naan that I used to make at the restaurant, but I would typically put some yogurt in the dough for those. I did not for these pita, but it wouldn't have hurt.

Pita, Still Puffed from the Oven

When all was said and done, I was really tired. I no longer stand in the kitchen and cook all day and it shows. But I really am OK with that. I like the word retired in front of the word chef. It suits.

Yiouvetsi

Yiouvetsi

It was getting late in the morning on Monday when I called Ann to ask about dinner. She generally has some ideas about what kind of food she'd like and those ideas always help focus my mind. I can cook anything I want to (if the ingredients are on hand) and my mind sometimes gets lost in the possibilities. It always helps to have Ann point in a particular direction.

And Monday morning she said, "Let's have pasta. What do you have?"

I started calling off shapes to her while browsing the pantry shelves: pappardelle, gemelli, lumaconi, casarecce, rigatoni, orzo.

"Orzo! Can you make yiouvetsi?"

Can I make yiouvetsi? Of course I can, if I have some lamb. And I just happened to be heading to Costco where they generally have legs of lamb.

Yiouvetsi Basics: Lamb, Onions, Garlic, Cinnamon, Tomatoes

A yiouvetsi is a baking dish, a Greek clay casserole, that has lent its name to a family of baked meat and pasta dishes. When Ann says "make me yiouvetsi," she means arni yiouvetsi, lamb and orzo. At the restaurant, we make vegetarian versions and seafood versions. Octopus yiouvetsi is a staff favorite.

The ingredients are simple and the procedure is simple as you will see in the recipe below. It all comes down to the quality of the ingredients, like most simple dishes. The bowl of yiouvetsi that you see below is incredible, the best that I have ever eaten or made, so good, in fact, that Ann went back for thirds.

Bowl of Heaven

Arni Yiouvetsi

This simple and classic dish of comfort food will require a large ceramic or other baking dish. As you can see above, I used my large oval cast iron cocotte. I use my cocotte so that I can start the dish on the stove and then go to the oven: one pan, not much to clean up. If you use ceramic, you will need a sauté pan in which to brown the meat and cook the onions and garlic. With full prep, cooking, and resting time considered, allow 2 and a half hours to make this dish. Active cooking and prepping is about an hour.

1/2 cup or more extra virgin olive oil
1 small leg of lamb, cubed, about 3 pounds
2 medium onions, diced
12 cloves garlic, minced
1 cinnamon stick
1-2 tablespoons dried oregano
1 quart tomatoes, diced in juice
1 lemon, juiced
salt to taste
1-2 quarts of water
1 pound of orzo
4 ounces kefalotyri or feta cheese

Preheat the oven to moderate, 350F. Heat a pan in which to brown the meat over high flame and then add the olive oil. You did not misread the quantity. The key quality that separates a yiouvetsi from other baked pastas is the oily, lemony slickness of the pasta. You want that much oil or possibly more.

Season and brown the lamb in batches and remove. Add the onions, garlic, cinnamon, and oregano to the pan. The reason I fudge the quantity of oregano is that my experience is that each type and batch of oregano is more or less potent. If you don't know your oregano, add some now and then taste and adjust later in the cooking process.

Once the onions are translucent, start deglazing your pan by adding some of the tomato juice and scraping all the bits off the bottom of the pan. If you are baking in this pan, go ahead and add all the tomatoes and lemon juice at this point. If not, transfer the onions to the baking dish and add the tomatoes and lemon juice. Add the lamb and cover with water.

If you are using a flame safe pan, bring the mixture to a slow boil before transferring to the oven for one hour. If you are using a ceramic dish, go ahead and put it in the oven at this point but cook it for 90 minutes instead of an hour.

Check the lamb for tenderness; check the liquid for seasoning; and fish out the cinnamon stick. If you are happy with the doneness of the lamb, add the orzo and stir. Return to the oven for 20 minutes.

Although feta is less commonly used than kefalotyri, I prefer feta. In either case, I like to cover the top of the casserole with the cheese and turn on the broiler to brown the cheese just slightly as you can see in the top photo above.

Let the yiouvetsi rest for 20 minutes or so before serving. Sprinkle or grate additional cheese over each portion as desired.

A Lazy Summer Sunday

Money being tight these days, we are spending a lot more time at home cooking and playing on Sundays that we would normally do during the summer. I really, really wanted to go to Glen Manor Vineyard this weekend, but that costs money we don't have, so I shut my mouth and we put together a great menu for the day.

Wine Line Up: Argyle Pinot Noir and Elk Cove Pinot Gris

It ended up being an Oregon wine day. We had Elk Cove Pinot Gris with our shrimp croquettes for lunch and Argyle Pinot Noir with our mussels for dinner. We had a local Catoctin Creek Petit Verdot on hand as well, but it never got opened.

Annie Frying Her Shrimp Croquettes

Shrimp Croquettes: Roux and Shrimp, Chilled and Breaded

Sometime this past week, Ann had made shrimp croquettes by folding cooked shrimp into a thick roux, chilling it, molding into croquettes, and rolling them in panko. She fried them up for lunch on Sunday. They were delicious with the Pinot Gris.

Watermelon Salad with Mint, Feta, and Red Onions

Mussels with Chorizo, Red Onions, Fennel, Garlic, and Orange Zest

For dinner, I made a watermelon salad by dicing seedless watermelon and feta and mixing that with thinly sliced red onion and chiffonaded fresh mint from the garden. A pinch each of salt and pepper and a splash each of extra virgin olive oil and Sherry vinegar finished the salad.

A big bowl of mussels accompanied the watermelon salad. I started by cooking the onion, garlic, and chorizo, then adding a bit of fennel confit (grilled, slow poached in oil, and covered in a tangy vinaigrette) and white wine. The mussels went in and finished steaming in a couple of minutes. I pulled them out and then reduced the sauce just slightly and poured it over the mussels. A good loaf of crusty bread hot out of the oven finished our lazy summer Sunday supper. A great day at home with my wife!

Easter 2013

In between snowstorms and rain falling from sullen grey skies, the sky became clear enough on Wednesday evening for me to see the full moon, meaning that Easter was just around the corner. I had thought about it a little bit about a month ago when Ann first brought up doing lamb again for Easter. I thought about it for about five minutes, long enough to scratch out a menu on my clipboard—yes, in this digital world, this particular dinosaur's personal assistant is a clipboard—and then promptly forgot about it until I saw the full moon.

I don't know why, but it somehow seemed fitting to do a little Greek food for Easter this year. I just had a hankering for some honest, home-cooked Greek food with no shortcuts. So I set about this menu on Good Friday by getting my pita dough started and then prepped most of the dinner on Saturday during the day, and what little was left over à la minute on Sunday.

Tom and Ann Matthes joined us for dinner. We had expected Ann's parents but her dad, Bob, was not feeling well. We missed them.

Mezés

Olives

Pita

Taramosalata

Marinated Cucumbers

Dolmades

Dinner

Arni Lemonato (Slow-Roasted Lamb)

Roasted Potatoes

Horta: Spinach Braised with Onions and Dill

Dessert

Orange Salad with Pistachios, Candied Pine Nuts, Feta, Mint, and Olive Oil
Cheeses

Dolmades and Marinated Cucumbers

Top to Bottom: Tzatziki, Olives, Taramosalata

I made tzatziki from really awesome goat milk yogurt and traditional taramosalata from bread, tarama, olive oil, grated onion, and lemon juice. I wish that my tarama (mullet roe, bottarga) had a more pronounced fishy flavor, but it was still good.

Ed-Made Pita

As I mentioned earlier, I started pita dough on Friday to let it ferment through several rises to develop flavor. Then I baked several sheet trays of it on Saturday and rewarmed it in the oven on Sunday. I make pita from the exact same dough that I make focaccia and pizza dough. And I make naan from the same dough, substituting yogurt for the olive oil.

Arni Lemonato me Patates, Horta

For the lamb this year, I decided to go with shanks because they are my favorite cut, but I decided to do something different: slow roast them. For whatever reason, I have always braised them in the past. I cut 5-6 slits in each shank and inserted a sliver of garlic, rubbed them with olive oil, and gave them a generous sprinkle of salt and pepper, then roasted them in a very hot oven for about 20 minutes, turning once, until they were browned all the way around. I squeezed a couple lemons over the shanks and sprinkled them with oregano, then added about four ounces of water to the bottom of the roasting pan and double-wrapped it in foil. The shanks cooked in a slow oven for an additional two and a half hours.

I scored some pretty Kennebec potatoes at the farmers market and they got roasted in a very hot convection oven until crispy done. The star of the plate was the horta, the greens, which I only wilted instead of braising. I only used spinach this time because Ann is a bit iffy on other greens and I wanted her to enjoy them. I sweated a finely diced onion in olive oil with several slivered cloves of garlic, then added the spinach and just wilted it. Into the pan next went a little feta cheese, fresh dill, and the first tiny mint leaves of the year from the garden. A quick season with salt and pepper and we had a fabulous side dish.

Tom's Cheeses: Gouda, Detroit Street Brick, Gorgonzola, Cabot Cheddar

Tom and Ann brought cheese for dessert. The orange gouda and the goat brick, I've already discussed in a prior post. The cheese in the front right is Cabot's (yes, the same people who make so-so block grocery store cheese) Clothbound Cheddar, that has been aged by affineurs in Vermont for a minimum of 13 months. Really, really delicious Cheddar that even the Brits would be forced, albeit most grudgingly, to admit is worthy. The hit of the day for me though was the Gorgonzola Naturale, just above the Cheddar in the photo. The texture is just so damned creamy and perfect on this particular wheel of cheese. Splendid!

Blood Orange Salad

No doubt we all know by now that I just don't care for sweets for dessert, though I do have a fondness for fruit. So I made a salad of sliced blood oranges and then tossed chunks of blood oranges with olives and feta and put that over the sliced oranges. I drizzled this with honey and extra virgin olive oil then sprinkled it with salt, pistachios, candied pine nuts, and the cutest, tiniest baby mint leaves from the garden.

Arni Yiouvetsi

So Friday night at 9:15 as dinner service is starting to wind down, I have a chance to look at my cell phone, the first chance I've had since we started cranking at 5:30. And what do I see but these back-to-back texts from my wife? Seriously, I've been cooking and sending food to the dining room as fast I can for nearly four hours and I'm supposed to be thinking about dinner on Sunday?!?

It was a good idea and (Oh, by the way!) I was on the hook for blog material for a vendor who sent me some lamb samples to write about for his blog and just happened to have nice lamb in the cooler. But I wasn't going to let on to Ann that I would make yiouvetsi: I would surprise her. So I didn't say anything about yiouvetsi in my reply and merely let her know about what time I thought I would be home that evening.


Yiouvetsi Ingredients

Saturday night, I arrived long after Ann had gone to bed and stashed all my ingredients in our second refrigerator in the garage so that she wouldn't see them. Sunday noon, we were just on our way out the door to Delaplane Cellars to talk to Jim and Betsy about some upcoming catering that we are doing for them, when I asked Ann to grab a couple bottles of water out of the fridge for our trip. She looked a little perplexed at first to see all these things (I think the big green and white tin of Bulgarian sheep's milk feta threw her for a second) and then it dawned on her: "You're making yiouvetsi!"

Just out of the Oven

Over the years, I have arrived at a very simple yiouvetsi that really appeals to me. I cube and sear lamb and remove it from the pan. Then I add onions and brown them just a bit. Back into the pan goes the lamb along with tomatoes and their juice, oregano, lemon juice, and everything gets covered with water. After the lamb braises to tenderness, I add orzo and put it back in the oven until the orzo is plumped. Then I like to strew some feta about the top and lightly brown it.

The feta is my own touch and I do it because it pleases me: most yiouvetsi is served with a hard grating cheese that is sprinkled on the dish at the table. Sometimes I sprinkle a little ground cinnamon on the meat before browning it: I did this time; sometimes I add (a lot of) garlic: I did not this time. I deglazed the pan with a little white wine this time too, not something I always do. To me, this is not a dish to be cooked with red wine, though many do, but it is clearly a dish to be served with a big red wine.

Deliciousness