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.

Note to Self: Roasted Chicken with Artichokes, Lemon, and Garlic

Here's an impromptu dish from last evening that Ann is raving about and wants me to make again, which I will never do if I don't document it, because it, like so many thousands of dishes I have cooked in the past, will escape the tenuous confines of my feeble mind for the vast ether.

Roasted Chicken with Artichokes, Lemon, and Garlic

Olive oil in the pan, chicken thighs, peeled garlic cloves, salt and pepper, artichoke hearts, lemon slices, Italian parsley, rosemary, olive oil drizzle over; roast 400 until done. Voilà! That's all the recipe a chef needs.

A Fish out of Water

We're all creatures of habit for the most part, aren't we?

I know I am. When I get in the kitchen, I expect things to be in a certain location and when they are not, it throws my game off.

Off my game is how I felt the first time trying to cook in our new kitchen, a fish out of water.

A simple case in point: in our last two kitchens, the knives lived in a knife block on the counter next to the cutting board, easily within reach when needed. Trying to declutter our new island, I purchased an in-drawer knife block that lives in the righthand island drawer. After years of reaching for knives on top of the counter, now they're hidden away in a drawer, neither good nor bad, just different, a confounding of muscle memory.

And so it went while cooking in the new kitchen for the first time last week. Things were not where my body thought they ought to be based on muscle memory, despite when designing the kitchen, my visualizing the new location of the items that we most often use. Visualization is part and parcel of my being: every night at the restaurant, when I was actively cooking as opposed to expediting, I would cook (my part of) each dish in my head while standing at my station, ensuring that each tool and ingredient was exactly where I expected it. Efficiency is, after all, born of familiarity and organization.

Despite all the time that I spent visualizing where things would go in the new kitchen, that did not mean that I had considered everything, or that everything would fit where I thought it should go, or even that my body would automatically reach for something where it was hiding. Cooking the first meal in this kitchen reminded me of cooking as a guest chef in somebody else's restaurant. I would always feel a bit helpless in not knowing where anything was. I'm sure if you've ever cooked at somebody else's house, you can relate.

Though it was awkward reaching for the salt, a tasting spoon, or a towel and not finding it right away, it was still a blast to finally cook a meal after a month and a half with no kitchen, even if I had no clue how to work the stove controls. It won't take long to build new habits and muscle memory in our new kitchen and I am looking forward to no longer feeling like a fish on dry land.

Arugula, Tomatoes, Goat Cheese, and Marcona Almonds
with Tomato-Hazelnut Vinaigrette

Pasta with Chicken Confit and Sugar Snaps in Garlic-Thyme Cream;
Crispy Chicken Skin

Brebirousse d'Argental Cheese with Persimmons,
Chipotle-Tangerine Marmalade, and Rosemary Caramel

Estouffade d'Agneau à la Provençale

Ann has been thinking a lot recently about dishes she wants me to make. She had been leafing through a French country cookbook and was intrigued by a Provençale farmhouse recipe for a lamb stew. At her urging, I bought a lamb shoulder at the farmers market a couple of weeks back and set out to make a stew.

My stew is modeled on one called an estouffade which can also be called a daube after the daubière, the specialized pot in which the stew cooks. By either moniker, this stew is made most typically from red meat, lamb or beef, that has been marinated with vegetables and red wine and then cooked slowly in a covered braising dish of the cook's choice, be it cocotte, doufeu, or daubière.

The word estouffade might seem familiar to you as it is to me. When I was a teenager in Alabama, I was highly influenced by Cajun cuisine which calls certain stews étouffées. Both words come from the verb étouffer meaning to smother, but are distanced from each other in time and by an ocean, the one being Parisian French and the other Acadian French, the form of French that migrated to first Québec in the 1600s and then later to the bayou country of south Louisiana. In the latter half of the 20th century in Cajun country, étouffée move further away from estouffade to become a roux-based stew of shellfish, typically shrimp or crawfish, less commonly of crab or white fish.

Estouffade d'Agneau; Purée de Celeri-Rave

Enough with the language history and on with the lamb stew that you can see on a pile of celery root purée. At the farmers market, I picked up a couple of nice celery roots, the first of the year, with an eye towards braising chunks of them in the stew instead of potatoes. But after lugging them home, I decided to turn them into a purée and serve the estouffade over them.

You can see how transparent the broth is and it's just what I wanted for a home dinner. But for restaurant service, I would have reduced the broth and amped it with lamb glace and potentially have thickened it with a beurre manié, a mixture of butter and flour kneaded into a ball. I would have also cooked the vegetables separately and combined everything at the last second before plating. But then, that just wouldn't be home cooking, would it?

A stew is something that you are supposed to throw in the oven or on a back burner and forget about, not slave over. The French even have an awesome verb, mijoter, that captures this idea of throwing something on low heat and forgetting about it and letting it do its thing until it achieves awesomeness. Sure, we have braise and we have simmer, but they don't capture the full essence or insouciance of mijoter.

Making a daube or estouffade is at least a two-day process. On the first day, you prep and marinate the lamb and vegetables and make the stock. You cook and serve the lamb on day two, or as in my case, on day three.

Lamb Shoulder, Carrots, Leeks, Rosemary Ready to Marinate

First, break down the lamb shoulder, cubing the lamb into chunks while reserving the trim to make a stock in which to braise the stew. Put the lamb in a large bowl.

Next, prep the vegetables: carrots in chunks and leeks, sliced into centimeter-wide coins. More traditionally, cooks use onions, but I had some beautiful leeks that I wanted to use. Add the vegetables to the lamb.

Add whatever herbs you want: I opted for rosemary only. Add seasoning: garlic, salt, pepper, and orange zest. Orange zest is a sometimes added to Provençale stews along with olives and rosemary. This happens to be a flavor combination that resonates with me, so that's what I did.

Toss everything together with a half a bottle of red wine and then put it in the refrigerator at least overnight. My lamb marinated two nights because I wasn't ready to cook it the next day.

Lamb Trim for Stock

Lamb shoulder contains a lot of fat and gristle, unlike the leg which is leaner. I prefer shoulder for stews because it braises out more tender than leg, though either will do. You could even start with pre-cubed kebab meat, but then you won't be able to make stock from the trim.

You can see that I got a lot of trim. In fact, from a 2.4-pound lamb shoulder, I only got a pound and a quarter of lamb cubes to stew.

Browning Trim for Stock

To make the stock, brown the trim well, to the point where all the surfaces are caramelized as you can see in the photo above. When they are brown, pour off as much of the fat as you can and then add water. I added a quart of water and brought the stock down to a cup and a half. And then I added another quart of water and did it again.

Stock, Ready to Refrigerate

Once the stock has reduced, I like to refrigerate it overnight so that I can pop the layer of fat right off the top and discard it. There are lots of ways to degrease a stock, but for a dish that takes two days to make, you might as well let the refrigerator do the hard work.

Estouffade Almost Ready for Oven

When you cook the lamb, you have two options. You can separate the lamb from the marinade, pat it dry with paper towels, and brown it. Or, you can just dump it in a pan and start cooking. You get slightly different flavors: a rich caramelized lamb flavor versus a lighter, fresher lamb flavor.

In my house, browning the lamb isn't an option. Because the lamb has been marinated and is full of liquid, it takes a very high flame to brown it, even after it has been patted dry. That is absolutely guaranteed to set off my smoke detector, so browning is out for me. Moreover, I did not want any added fat from browning the meat.

Some people would separate the lamb from the marinade and then cook the marinade to reduce the liquid in it. I didn't feel like going this extra step. It would have resulted in a thicker, darker sauce, but I was aiming for a lighter, less heavy dish.

This is the point at which you would add any ingredients that were not in the marinade. For my part, I added a couple dozen black olives as would be typically done in Provence. I also fished out the rosemary sprigs and, as you can see above, I put the lamb stock in the pan. Some people would also add some tomatoes at this point, but that's not the flavor that I wanted.

The pan went into a moderate oven (about 350F) covered for about three hours and uncovered for a final half hour to help concentrate the braising juices slightly.

Once the lamb was done and cooling, I made a batch of celery root purée and then served dinner. Because I was careful to limit the fat (carefully prepping the lamb, defatting the stock, no added olive oil, no thickening of the sauce with beurre manié, and no butter or cream in the celery root), we ended up with a pretty light and fairly healthy dinner.

Estouffade d'Agneau à la Provençale

The following recipe will feed four people easily and six if necessary. Allow two days to make this stew.

2-1/2 pound lamb shoulder, or 1-1/4 pounds of lamb cubes

10-12 medium carrots, in chunks

2 large leeks, in centimeter-wide rings

8 sprigs rosemary

1 teaspoon Kosher salt

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

8 cloves garlic, minced

zest of one orange

half a bottle of red wine

1-1/2 cups lamb stock

24 Nyons or other black olives

Follow the detailed procedure above. To recap, mix the lamb, carrots, leeks, rosemary, salt, pepper, garlic, orange zest, and red wine. Refrigerate at least overnight, stirring from time to time. Place the marinated lamb in a baking dish and remove the rosemary. Add the olives and lamb stock. Cover the dish and bake until the lamb is almost done. Uncover and cook another half an hour.

Roasted Rockfish with Herbes de Provence on Ratatouille

"You've never made me ratatouille."

A statement, not a question, from my wife, a request really, disguised.

Ann hinted that I should make ratatouille, a dish that I have never made throughout a lifetime in the kitchen. "I don't really like it," I responded. Like is the wrong verb, because I do not dislike it. I just would never care to make it for myself. Ever.

There's a bit of backstory here. We grew up without a lot of money, one small income, three ravenous kids. We were not poor, but going out to eat was never an option. Our cars seemed to be third-hand. Luxury foods were not in the cards and during the summer, we ate largely off our garden, my dad being an inveterate gardener.

Those of you who garden, you're probably already beyond the punch line. You know.

Our garden was a good quarter of an acre if not a half, at least three times the size of our current lot here in Oregon. And my dad was an exuberant planter. If three squash plants would feed our family, why not plant a 100-foot row? Ditto for tomatoes. Why not have 50 plants? Peppers. How about four dozen plants of seven or eight varieties?

We kids were free labor to work this massive garden and I foremost, being the oldest and strongest. Our Saturdays were given over to picking vegetables in the morning and prepping and preserving them in the afternoon.

We ate well because of this all year. One wall of our farmhouse basement was reserved for shelves of jars from canning: tomatoes, tomato juice, ketchup, relishes of all sorts, all manner of pickles, peaches, green beans, yellow wax beans, beets, and so forth. Bins of potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and apples lined another wall. Our freezer was jam packed with gallon bags of corn, peas, lima beans, and black-eyed peas, the vegetables that did not can well. I learned to put up from day one.

But back to late summer. Those of you who garden know well late July and August when after a trickle of vegetables during the early summer, the garden gods kick things into hyperdrive and bestow an unceasing bounty of tomatoes, peppers, squash, and eggplants. Ready or not, here they come!

My mother's answer, clearly in self-defense from this onslaught, was ratatouille. Ratatouille three to four nights a week. The first couple of times were OK, but by night three, I was ready to vomit at the mere smell of the stuff. Ratatouille for weeks was what we ate with little variety.

Ann, now you know why I have never ever made ratatouille since.

Roasted Rockfish with Herbes de Provence on Ratatouille

I relented of course. How can I not make something for my wife when she asks? How could I disappoint her? One of the things I always disliked about my mother's version of ratatouille is that it would be stewed nearly to death. I wanted to freshen it up a bit and serve a simple piece of roasted fish with it.

Herbes de Provence

It's hard to make a typical Provençale dish without their classic herbs, the soi-disant "herbes de Provence." Everybody's mix is varied. Mine is what I gathered from the garden: rosemary, thyme, oregano, lavender, and basil. These I destemmed and chopped fine.

I do have a quasi-love affair with these herbs and fond memories as well. I remember in great detail driving with Aimé Guibert, the owner of the famed Mas de Daumas Gassac in Aniane, from his home at the winery to dinner in nearby Montpellier. Excitedly and quickly once we climbed to a ridgeline just after dark, he pulled the vehicle to the side of the road and urged a swift exit. "Sentez!" he urged with typical Gallic passion, eager to show off the bounty of his native land. Smell, he insisted.

The warm breezes wafted up the hillside bringing along the fabulous aromas of the garrigue, the scrubland that is common to the Mediterranean coast, be it in Greece, Italy, Provence, or in the Hérault as we were. I could smell the wild rosemary and lavender, but above all the low-growing wild thyme. I could not resist rubbing my fingers through that thyme and then inhaling the amazing aromas.

I have been hooked ever since and thyme is undoubtedly my favorite essential woody herb.

Roasting Roll-Cut Zucchini, Squash, and Eggplant

To create a fresh and lively version of ratatouille, I wanted a base of roasted vegetables. This intentional caramelization and concentration of the vegetables was no doubt a reaction to the overly stewed quality of my mother's version with its mushy, disintegrated vegetables.

Although ratatouille is a peasant dish at heart, many chefs prefer that each of the vegetables be cooked separately and then mixed. This cuisine soignée approach flies in the face of the cuisine pauvre origin of the dish in which all the vegetables would be stewed together. But I like it.

I took a modern approach by roasting the zucchini, squash, and eggplant together after tossing them in the herbs and salt. I roll-cut these long vegetables in the Chinese style so that they would all be in similar-sized pieces and roast at the same time. Once the vegetables were roasted, I sautéed a chopped onion with a bunch of garlic, then added the roasted vegetables, roasted and sliced piquillo peppers, and halved grape tomatoes.

My Ratatouille

I warmed the vegetables through after mixing them, but only just. I did not want the tomatoes to break down at all. I wanted them to retain their freshness and sweet acidity to brighten the dish.

While I was finishing up the vegetables, the herb-covered rockfish, a local species of white fish, was in the oven roasting. Just as it set in the center, I pulled it out and plated it over the ratatouille.

I quite enjoyed it, my first ever foray into making ratatouille. It only took a half a century to get over my instinctual dislike of the dish.

Olive Rosemary Focaccia

One of the great luxuries of being retired is having the time to bake bread without having to worry about massaging it around your work schedule. The other morning, Ann said that she'd like to have focaccia for dinner and went in the kitchen to put the dough together while I went outside for a couple of sprigs of rosemary.

Kalamata Olive and Rosemary Focaccia

Focaccia or fougasse as it is known in Provence is one of the very simplest breads to make. I think Ann has some kind of recipe for it in her head, but I don't really know. When I make focaccia, I just put a cup of water in a bowl and make a wet dough from that with a glug of olive oil, some salt, and a mere sprinkling of yeast. It really is that difficult.

Flour, Salt, Yeast, Rosemary, Olives

Ann doesn't even knead her dough; she merely stirs it around with a fork until it is a wet shaggy mass. At this point, she covers it and lets the yeast do its thing. Me, I give my dough a few turns. Why? Because I like to feel the dough on my hands.

Dough, After Third Rise

After Ann put the dough together, I put it outside in the shade to rise, it being pretty warm out and pretty chilly still inside from the cool overnight temperatures. During the afternoon, I knocked it down for two more rises. After the third rise, I put it on a sheet tray in a 425F oven and baked it until it was golden brown all over.

Why three rises? Because that's what suited our schedule. We weren't ready to eat at the end of two rises, so three it was. Making bread is not rocket science and there is no one-size-fits-all formula. But it sure is nice to have the time to let it rise leisurely and not have to contort our day to work it in.

Rack of Lamb from Hell

Recently, I happened to find a rack of lamb at an affordable price and decided to make a great meal out of it. I also brought home from the farmers market a bunch of cavolo nero and a quart of new potatoes, stopping by the store for a bottle of Nebbiolo, probably our very favorite varietal. This was going to be a celebratory meal: we just can't afford rack of lamb or Nebbiolo very often.

Rack of Lamb, Roasted New Potatoes, Cavolo Nero

It's not often that I cook a restaurant-quality meal at home. I don't have the ingredients, the kitchen, the staff, a commercial dish machine, or, if I'm being honest, the driven desire to do it any longer. But every once in a while, I do like to make a great meal for my favorite diner, Annie. I don't do it to impress her: she's seen all my tricks by now. I do it because I want to do it for her; in short, it's the principal way that I show her that I love her.

You'd think that with me being a chef, that everything would go along just great in the kitchen. You'd be wrong. Life happens to chefs too, but I think we're probably more accustomed to stuff going wrong in the kitchen and figuring out how to get dinner on the table anyway. The photo below is proof of that.

At the restaurant, when things would go wrong, I was so focused on solving the problem while managing an entire kitchen and a board full of checks that I had no time or energy for getting upset. Here at home, however, when things go wrong, I have plenty of time to get mired in anger and rant and fume.

I'm having a hard time letting go of the mindset that everything must be perfect. That's hard to do after a career in an industry that expects perfection and is unforgiving of even small mistakes. Restaurant Gods forbid that lamb chops go out medium instead of medium rare: you're going to get crucified on the review sites.

When you own a small restaurant and you and your staff depend on you to keep the doors open, the pressure to avoid negative reviews that might slow traffic is overwhelmingly intense. That pressure cooker mentality is not good for anyone's mental health.

So, while this is a story of how to prep a frenched lamb rack like you might find in a restaurant, it is also the story of a cascading series of problems that erupted while putting this dinner together. It is also an introspective story in my quest to let go of the restaurant mindset. It's not a particularly noble story, but it is an honest one.

Lamb Rack as Bought

So here is the lamb rack, before it turned into the rack from hell, just as it came from the butcher. It has been frenched by cutting away the meat from the tips of the bones. While most people would be satisfied with this lamb rack as is, I'm used to running a restaurant at a higher caliber. For my standards, there is way too much fat cap left on the rack and the bones are not nearly clean enough. You can see how especially sloppily the first bone has been frenched.

Trimmed Lamb Rack

I spent about ten minutes prepping the rack, a not insignificant amount of labor. First, I trimmed the fat cap back to what I wanted. I didn't want all the fat on top because I wanted to put a crust on the rack. In addition, there is another layer of fat that you cannot see below this top layer. You can see this in the first photo where I have cut the rack into chops. Also, you can see the pile of trimmings that I have removed from the so-called cleaned bones by scraping them down with a knife.

Mustard Glaze Ingredients

For this presentation, I wanted to coat the rack in breadcrumbs and to get the breadcrumbs to adhere to the meat, I made a glaze of mustard, olive oil, rosemary, and garlic. This is a classic French technique that you can detect from the phrase à la diable, in the style of the devil, on old-school menus. The reference to the devil results from the spicy piquancy of the mustard.

 

Mustard Glaze

I use olive oil to thin the mustard mix to the point where I can brush it on the lamb rack. I coated both the top and bottom sides of the meat and then rolled the rack in panko, pressing the panko into the mustard glaze. Other breading will work, but I really prefer the crust that panko gives. Panko for the restaurant came in the same size bags as 50-pounders of flour. We used to blow through those giant bags of panko.

Breaded Rack of Lamb

You can see the breaded rack above. I don't put breadcrumbs on the end, but you could if you wanted. It would be more difficult, but not impossible, to brown the breadcrumbs on the ends.

Seared Rack of Lamb

Next up, I browned the rack in a pan, to give the breadcrumbs some color and to firm the crust. Here is where things started to go south. I don't have a pan that is big enough to really sear the rack, as you can see from the bones hanging over the edge of the pan. Also, on the far left of the photo, you can see where a lot of the crust fell off. I was getting pretty irritated at this point, asking myself quite loudly why I put all this effort into dinner, just to have it start falling apart. To be fair, I was raging.

Back in the restaurant days, we would keep mustard and panko handy. We'd repair the damage and brown the patched spots by basting them with boiling oil until they were as browned as the rest of the crust. I just wasn't equipped to do this at home, having already cleaned up the breading station.

I was so invested in the labor in prepping the lamb rack to this point that I got really torqued, beyond any rational basis. All the while, Annie kept urging me to let it go and telling me that it didn't have to be perfect.

New Potatoes and Rosemary, Ready to Roast

A few minutes before the lamb went into the oven, I put the new potatoes in to roast and gave the cavolo nero a quick sear. Cavolo nero, black cabbage in Italian, is also called lacinato, Tuscan black kale, and dinosaur kale, my least favorite name for this wonderful green. I'll have to do a post on it sometime. It took years at the restaurant to find someone who would grow it for us. Once I found that person, cavolo nero was a near constant on the menu.

Roasted Rack of Lamb, Resting

When the potatoes were about halfway done, I put the lamb rack in the oven. This is where things really, really started to piss me off. Not using my brain, I put the lamb rack on a sizzle platter, as I have done a million times before at the restaurant.

This reminds me of a table of 18 people, 14 of whom ordered lamb racks. And naturally, they ordered them all five temperatures from rare to well done. It's pretty intense not only to cook fourteen racks simultaneously, but to time them such that they all come up to different temperatures at the same time. And then there is the small problem of keeping track of which is which. I was a crazy lamb-cooking chef that night!

This night, however, I thought to go sit down with Ann while the rack roasted to temperature. Shortly after doing so, she asked me, "Why is smoke pouring out of the oven?" And before I could get to the oven, the smoke detector started blaring and would continue to go off for the next ten minutes.

If you think I was irritated by the crust falling off, that was nothing compared to opening the oven, being blinded by smoke, and seeing a pool of lamb fat burning on the bottom of the oven, all the while being serenaded by the @#%$#! deafening klaxon of the smoke detector.

Remember the second layer of fat that I mentioned earlier? It started melting in the heat of the oven and ran down the bones which, of course, were hanging over the edge of the sizzle platter. Drip, drip, drip all over the scorching gas flame cover at the bottom of the oven. Idiot!

I transferred the rack to a sheet tray, like I should have done in the first place. And while cleaning molten fat from the bottom of the blazing oven while the gas was roaring, in not quite my finest hour, I yelled obscenities at the f'ed up nature of our kitchen, our super-sensitive smoke detector, the shitty ventilation, and less than ideal home cookware.

With Annie's soothing words, I finally got myself calmed enough to move on with dinner.

Timing lamb racks, especially whole 7- or 8-bone racks, is tricky. One end of the rack is much larger than the other. Half racks, 3- or 4-bone racks, are a lot easier because the size difference between the two ends is much smaller. It's the same for the rack of any animal, but larger racks such as pork, elk, or beef are so much bigger that the timing is not nearly so critical. Antelope racks are smaller and also a bit trickier to time.

When I cook a whole lamb rack, I am looking to take the rack out of the oven when the large end is still bleeding rare. After resting, it will finish medium rare while the small end will end up an acceptable and juicy medium. When I plate a whole rack for two, I divide the chops between the two plates so that each diner gets some less done chops and some more done chops.

When the large end of the lamb rack reached 118F, I pulled it and set it up on the cutting board to rest for 20 minutes. There is no profit in cutting a roast right out of the oven. It will bleed out all over. To allow for resting, you need to count on an additional 5-7 degrees cook up while it rests, which is why I pulled the rack when the large end was very rare. As you can see in the photo, it ended up at very pretty medium rare, just where I wanted it.

Reducing Petit Verdot

While the rack was resting, I went about making a sauce, a modified beurre rouge, a classic French butter sauce. To do so, I reduced a glass of inky dark Petit Verdot until it was syrupy and then stirred in a couple large spoonfuls of the leftover mustard glaze which thickened quickly. I set the pan on the counter to cool, an important step for making any butter sauce.

Red Wine and Mustard Reduction

When I was ready to finish the sauce, I put it back on a moderate flame and added enough water to thin it so that I could whisk it. As I was gently warming the sauce, I whisked in a couple tablespoons of ice cold butter, cut into small cubes. As the butter melts, it thickens the sauce. You have to do this at cool temperatures or the butter sauce will break, leaving a separated oily mess in the pan. So it is always best to let your pan cool before trying to finish the sauce with butter.

 

Finishing the Beurre Rouge

Finally, I plated everything while Annie poured us glasses of Nebbiolo. Being retired, our budget rarely stretches to afford Barolo or high-end Barbaresco, so we have to drink around the edges of the area. And Vietti makes a great declassified Nebbiolo that can only be labeled as Langhe Rosso. For the budget conscious Nebbiolo fan, year in and year out, Perbacco is a smart buy.

The plate up was simple as you can see in the photo at the very top of this post. I put a bit of cavolo nero on top of a pile of roasted potatoes in the middle of a large plate. Then after making a teepee of lamb chops around the potatoes, I napped the edges with the beurre rouge.

Vietti Perbacco, A Great Inexpensive Nebbiolo

In the end, after all the disappointment and fuming on my part, the rack from hell provided a wonderful, sumptuously luxurious meal, our first in a very long time. I thank Annie for putting up with my irritability.

Revisiting the beginning of this post, I see part of my problem letting go. Annie is not a diner; she's my wife. She's not reviewing my food on Yelp. She's my biggest cheerleader and her dinner doesn't have to be perfect. She loves me regardless. And paying our mortgage no longer depends on what comes out of the kitchen. Someday, I hope to really take that to heart. It's an ongoing struggle.

As for dinners from hell, remind me sometime to regale you with the story of the packed house Saturday night when we had to, unknown to guests, shut the kitchen down to fight a blazing grill fire. For twenty long minutes, nothing came out of the kitchen, a night that I will never forget and one that puts my trivial lamb rack trials in perspective.

Summer Cocktails

It's high summer and the bar is now open!

The Bar on our Patio

Ann and I decided a fairly long time ago that we needed a small table on our front patio to serve as a bar for summer Happy Hours. Some years ago, Ann bought an old window sash at Habitat for Humanity. I thought it would be cool to reuse it for a sign reading BAR to hang on the wall above the table. Both bar table and sign are now installed and have made a beautiful addition to our favorite outdoor space.

Bar Sign Mock-Up

I refinished the sash by scraping off tons of mustard yellow overspray from the glass pane and painting the sash black. My fingers ached for days from the hours with a razor blade, scraping and scraping. I found a carnival lettering font on the internet and mocked up what I wanted painted on the glass, then took it to a local sign painter who specializes in gold foil signs. Totally coincidentally, he happens to be a neighbor who lives two houses away. A month or so later, we got back this really gorgeous work of art that you see in the photo below.

While the sign was away being painted, I made the bar table in the same style as all the cocktail tables that I had made for our outdoor spaces. Each is topped with French white oak staves recovered from wine tanks. Tank-aged red wines often have staves of oak hung inside to simulate barrel ageing; when the wine is bottled, the staves are no longer good for winemaking.

I'm working on ways to reuse them after leaving them outside in the weather for the winter so that the rains gently wash away most of the red wine lees and built-up tartrates. I could scrape, sand, or pressure wash the staves, but I want them to have a rustic look and not look raw and brand new.

The Finished Bar Table and Sign

We have certainly already started to put the bar to good use and I am back to creating cocktails. While we mostly drink red wine during cold weather, we drink a lot more beer and cocktails in hot weather. Here are three recent cocktails, all tonic based. Our cocktails have a tonic focus because we both like complexity in our drinks and we don't really appreciate sweet drinks: we want them to be balanced and refreshing. This rules out a lot of juice- and soda-based cocktails.

Red, White, and Blue Berry Smash

Red, White, and Blue Berry Smash

Conceived at Ann's request on the Fourth of July, "Make us a red, white, and blue cocktail!," this refreshing cocktail takes advantage of the abundance of summer berries here in the Willamette Valley. It's kind of a cross between a Tom Collins and a Gin and Tonic. The quantities in the recipe below are for two cocktails.

1/4 cup red raspberries

1/4 cup blueberries

1 sprig rosemary

2 teaspoons granulated sugar

3 ounces lemon vodka (Absolut Citron)

3 ounces London dry gin (Aria)

1-1/2 ounces elderflower liqueur (St. Germain)

8-10 drops lemon bitters (Fee's)

juice of 2 lemons

2-3 ounces simple syrup

6 ounces tonic water (Fever Tree Citrus)

Fill two tall glasses 2/3 full with ice cubes. Add 5-6 red raspberries and blueberries to each glass.

In a mortar, smash the remaining berries and rosemary with the sugar.

Add the berry mash and the remaining ingredients except the tonic water to a large mixing glass. Stir, then taste for balance. Ann likes more simple syrup; I like less. I like heavy bitters.

Strain into the two glasses. Top with tonic water and give a light swirl. Garnish with a lemon slice and a sprig of rosemary.

Summer Rosemary Tequila Tonic

Summer Rosemary Tequila Tonic

I find that a splash of tequila in a cocktail adds an herbal smokiness that can't readily be attributed to tequila and that makes for a really interesting flavor profile, especially when paired with rosemary.

1-1/2 ounces London dry gin (Aria)

3/4 ounce Triple Sec

3/4 ounce silver tequila

1/2 lemon, juiced

equal amount of simple syrup

4 dashes old fashioned bitters (Angostura)

tonic water

In a tall glass filled with ice, add the liquors, lemon juice, simple syrup, and bitters. Add tonic water to fill. Stir gently. Garnish with a lemon slice and a rosemary sprig.

Pomegranate Gin & Tonic

Pomegranate Gin & Tonic

This is a straightforward and delicious cross between a G&T and a gimlet. 

juice of half a lime

equal amount of simple syrup

1-1/2 ounces of London dry gin (Aria)

4 dashes pomegranate or rhubarb bitters (Fee's)

splash of pomegranate liqueur (Pama)

tonic water to top (Fever Tree)

In a tall glass filled with ice, add all the ingredients, stir gently, and garnish with a lime wedge.

Lamb Shanks with White Beans

I was just musing about lamb on the blog recently. Of the red meat, it is my favorite. It has been hard to find out here in Oregon and is relatively pricey compared to what I was used to in Virginia. Now that the quarantine is relaxing a little, we thought we might mask up and try the outdoor Saturday market here in McMinnville to see if we could find some lamb.

Lamb Shank on White Beans

There we came across a local lamb vendor, who was apologizing to us for lack of cuts. Demand is up because more people are cooking at home while throughput is down because the local abbatoirs are all backed up. Thank you once again COVID. He only had racks and shanks left. Ann and I both perked up at the mention of shanks. Exactly what is not to love about a meltingly tender lamb shank?

This being summer now, I wasn't going to braise the shanks in the oven and heat up the whole house, so I decided to use the slow cooker, something I have never done before. In the restaurant, we braised huge deep hotels pans of shanks in the oven.

To get started, I first browned the shanks and added them to the slow cooker with a large bouquet garni from the yard: a lot of rosemary and a bit of parsley, sage, basil, and oregano.

Lamb Shanks, Bouquet Garni

Then in the same pan, I sautéed some mirepoix and garlic. Once the onions in the mirepoix turned translucent, I scraped a hole in the center of the mirepoix and caramelized a tablespoon or two of tomato paste on the bottom of the pan, then deglazed with some rosé from the fridge.

Mirepoix Cooking, Great Smells

After deglazing, I added the mirepoix to the slow cooker along with a small amount of chicken stock and set it on high for six hours. Every couple of hours, I checked the liquid levels. When it started to go dry, I would add a bit more liquid. Five and a half hours in, the lamb was done. I added a cup or so of chicken stock and four cans of cannellini to heat through.

I would have used dried white beans, but I did not start the dish until noon and that just didn't leave enough time to rehydrate and cook the beans, an overnight process. In the winter, I would use red wine, more tomato paste, and lamb stock to make a darker braise.

The shanks were delicious over white beans the first night, but possibly even better two nights later. Then, I picked the other two shanks, mixed the meat back into the beans, reduced the liquid to almost dry, swirled in a large amount of baby spinach leaves, and served the beans in a bowl topped with tomatoes and tzatziki for a super quick dinner. Lamb twice in one week, what a concept!

Roasted Potatoes with Garlic Cloves and Surry Sausage

Roasted Potatoes with Garlic Cloves and Surry Sausage

We're in the grips of the Thanksgiving Blues at the restaurant: business dies for the two weeks before and after Thanksgiving. It's really an ugly time and a reminder that January, February, and March are just about on us. Rather than stick around the restaurant on a barren Friday night and be constantly reminded that the sucking noise I am hearing is really the sound of my bank account on auto-empty, I decided to come home and try to forget about business for the night with Annie.

Last week, I had picked up a few yellow potatoes in anticipation of roasting them, but I never got around to it. I brought home three small Surry sausages, one for each of us, and cubed them along with the potatoes. I tossed these with olive oil, fresh rosemary from the garden, salt, pepper, and lots of whole peeled garlic cloves (about a half a pound) and then this mix went onto a sheet tray in a very hot oven with the convection fan on for about 25 minutes, turned once about 15 minutes in.

Roasted potatoes with rosemary and whole garlic cloves is one of my all-time favorite dishes. I've never roasted potatoes with Surry sausage before, but it is a huge winner. This dish is so, so delicious. I cannot forget this one.

A word about Surry sausage. These are small maybe two-ounce smoked pork sausages made by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons of Surry, VA. They have a firm texture and taste of pork, sage, and black pepper and have been made the same way as long as I can remember and I can remember more than 50 years. Sam Edwards once told me that they used to take the leftover fresh sausage that didn't sell, stuff it into casings, and smoke it to preserve it. Now, the demand is so great that they purpose make the smoked sausage; no longer is it a by product of their fresh sausage business. When you go to order them, look for "hickory-smoked sausage links." Now only they call them this: everyone else in the state calls them Surry sausage. They make different kinds of sausage, but these little smoked guys are what you want. They are one of the very best sausages in the world.