Leg of lamb

I had a leg of lamb I managed to score from Wegman's.  What a boon to Brooklyn that store is.  Wide aisles, nice lighting and a BAR upstairs!  Someone was thinking when they were designing this store.

Marinade

1 large preserved lemon, peel, pulp, seeds and some of the brine

7 cloves of garlic peeled

3 small twigs of rosemary, stripped from stem

handful of fresh parsley

hot pepper flakes

olive oil

Blend all together until it makes a loose dressing.  Taste, if not what you want, doctor it up to your liking.

Choose a large covered pan that can fit the lamb comfortably in it without too much left over space.  Cut deep slits all over the lamb and slather on the marinade and poking it down into all the slits and nooks and crannies.  My leg came with a nice fat cap and was semi-boned and tied.  I didn't want to have to tie it up again, so I cut the slits around the strings and put it into the cavity where the femur used to be.  Sprinkle with ground pepper, no salt at this point, the lemons and brine will take care of that.

Let marinate for a couple of hours, or over night.

The Cook

Preheat oven to 300° F and put the covered lamb into the pot.  Add some white wine.  If you want, you can raise the lamb up on a rack or a bed of thickly sliced onions.  Check on it in about 1.5 hours.  I like my lamb leg well done, but lamb chops medium rare.  Don't be a hater.

white wine and/or chicken stock

2 large onions cut into 1/2" slices

Add onions to the pot now

Add more liquid if necessary.  Taste to see if you need any salt or other seasonings.  Cover again, and let ride for another hour or so.  Timing is until the leg is easily pierced with a fork without resistance.  

Check liquid level and remove lid, increase temp to 500° F to crisp up outside fat.  Alternately, you could blow torch it as well if you didn't want to worry about the oven.  You could also brown the top of the lamb at the outset of the cooking process.  Whatever floats your boat.

Nota bene:

This is not my usual lamb recipe.  It is just something I thought about trying and improvised 

Cleaning out the fridge stir fry

I do like stir fry dishes, they are quick, very flavorful and damn tasty.

In the fridge I had

1 sweet pepper
1/2 head of cabbage
a bunch of collard greens
cauliflower
broccoli
celery
green beans

In pantry I had

wood ear mushrooms
onions
pixian paste
dark soy
light soy
chinese black vinegar
shaoxing cooking wine
ginger
garlic
chili crisp, optional

Chopped all the veggies into bitesize pieces, soaked and chop the mushrooms and prepped, in little bowls,

1 inch peeled ginger piece, julienned
2 thinly sliced garlic cloves
1-2 T pixian paste
1 C chicken stock or water

Heat that wok or big fry pan with 1-2 T of oil up until it is hot.  Add ginger shreds then all chopped veggies including onions and mushrooms.  Stir fry for a few minutes to wilt veggies and give off their water.  Add the sliced garlic, stir into veggies.

Add pixian paste, a splash of dark soy, for color, a splash of light soy, for salt, a glug of shaoxing wine and a glug of the vinegar.

Taste for balance.  If veggies are still too crunchy, add a bit of the chicken stock and cover until veggies are a texture you like.

Add chili crisp, if wanted and serve over rice.  Depending on your veggie load, you may need to adjust the amount of liquids added so as not to braise the veggies.

Achari Chicken

This is one of my very favorite Indian dishes.  It is also known as chicken with pickling spices.

There are 3 distinct steps in this recipe, but each is simple once you have set out all of your various spices.

Marinade

1 lb or so chicken parts.  (I think dark meat works better)

1/2 t salt

1/2 t tumeric

1 t Kashmiri chili powder

1 t ginger/garlic paste  (equal parts finely minced garlic and ginger)

1/2 c yogurt, whipped with a fork

Combine all ingredients after chicken until well blended. Add chicken parts and mix well and marinate for at least 1 hour.

Spice Paste

1 t coriander seeds

1 t cumin seeds

1/2 t mustard seeds

1/2 fenegreek seeds

1/4 t nigella or black onion seeds

Toast in a dry skillet until fragrant, let cook and grind into a powder and set aside

Cooking

3 T neutral oil or ghee

1 large onion sliced

Cook in a pan (arge enough to hold onions AND chicken with room to spare) until brown and beginning to crisp up.  Go longer than you think, it is the brown-ness that gives depth to the finished product.

Add to browned onions

handful of curry leaves

1 T garlic/ginger paste

1/2 t tumeric

Now add chicken and stir in a small can of diced tomatoes (14 oz, max for 1 lb chicken).  Cover and cook on lower heat until chicken is semi-tender.  Uncover cook until the oil separates.

Add to chicken

1/2 t salt

the reserved spice powder

2.5 t Kashmiri chili powder

handful of chopped cilantro

handful of chopped mint leaves

about 2 c of water or chicken stock

Simmer until the chicken is tender and soft.  Add in either 1 t amchur powder or juice of 1 lemon

Serve with rice and a side vegetable.  

This will quickly become your go to Indian dish.  Once you have all the spices, it is very easy to make and doubles nicely as well.  Only caution is to taste your Kashmiri chili powder first, sometimes it is quite mild, other times very spicy.  If yours happens to be spice, cut back on it to your spice level, if you are a chili head, hey, go for it, just don't overwhelm the other spices.  This should have a kick, but also a well rounded undertone of sour and savory flavors.

Salmon with mushrooms and onions

I adore salmon, almost in any way it's prepared.  Lately, I have been pan searing it with either cajun spices, blackening spice, lemon pepper, or just plain salt and pepper.

The key to getting luscious silky salmon is to not over cook it.  I have it down by now, and if I am unsure, I use an instant thermometer into the thickest part of the flesh and look for about 122-125 deg F.  It will carry over and get up to about 128-130 which is perfectly medium rare.  Taking the salmon out at about 122 ensures that the proteins in the flesh don't weep out and turn milky and chunky.  Yeech.

I prepped the onions and sauteed them after cooking the mushrooms.  I deglazed with some white wine and chicken stock and declared dinner ready.

I opened a nice bottle of carignane, and enjoyed the meal

What to do with leftover chicken.....why, make a chicken pot pie without the pie

I had made some chicken stock the other day and was looking to give some of it to neighbors, when it became clear that they had all left for places outside of NYC!  So sad, with so many containers of stock too!

I took some of the lemon chicken from the other night along with the usual veggies for a stew: carrots, celery, onions, some collard greens, potatoes and the veggies from the roasted chicken.  I sweated the onions a bit, added garlic, salt, dried shallots, and lemon pepper.  Into the pot went the rest of the veggies and after they had wilted a bit, I deglazed with some white wine.  I reduced that and added chicken stock and chopped chicken. Put the lid on and let it bubble away.  I realized I didn't add any flour to the pan in order to thicken the liquid, it is a pot pie after all.  I took about 2 t of soft butter and 2 t of flour and mashed them together to create beurre manie.  I added bits of it to the pot and, voila, beautiful creamy surroundings for the veggies and meat.

Roast Lemon Chicken

I love roasting a chicken.  Especially now with a convection oven.  The skin comes out cracking and the flavor is divine.

I stumbled on a way to make chicken using preserved lemons, courtesy of Rich.  The pulp is scraped out and saved and the rind is cut up into 8 pieces.  Each piece goes under the skin of the chicken.  2 on each side of the breast, one each on the thigh and leg.  Oil the skin and sprinkle with salt and pepper.  (Don't neglect to salt and pepper the cavity.)   I usually don't truss a bird that isn't going to be on a rotisserie, so this babe is splayed out in the photo.

I took the preserved lemon pulp, along with 2 cloves of honey fermented garlic, olive oil, and some hot honey and blitzed it in a processor.  I tasted it, added some more salt and pepper and olive oil and
rubbed it all over a bunch of veggies that were going to be the rack that the chicken roasted on.

Here is the final product

You can see the triangles of the preserved lemon under the skin.  It was perfect in all ways possible!  So sorry to see that finished.

Here are the finished bed of veggies, you can pick out the potatoes, cauliflower, and peppers.  Perfectly tender, slightly lemony, and just what the doctor order in this dire times.

Long time, no cook! Instant pot lasagna

In these strange, strange times of pandemic and other weird stuff, I have re-found my blog and am going to try to get back into this.

With home self-isolation, I now have time to post things up with photos and commentary.

Let's start with March 30, 2020.

We were going to have a zoom lunch with Anna and Andy and their posse.  They live in England, so it was the only way to see them and get to talk to them and their friends.  The proposed menu was italian.

I have a couple of new toys, 2 instant pots, which I really like.  I decided to make lasagna in the 8 qt pot so I could use the air-fryer lid to brown the top after it cooked.

I used Ivy Manning's instant pot lasagna recipe and it worked out perfectly.  The recipe is available on line or in the cookbook, Instant Pot Italian.

The recipe is a good one.  I did have a bit of leakage of the tomato sauce that was easily stopped by a double layer of paper towels under a layer of foil on the bottom.  The top was layered with foil as well.  Pressure cooked for the recommended time, actually, a bit longer as it was a bigger spring form pan.

The texture was excellent and it held together really well.  It made a tremendous amount for 2 people, but we managed to eat it all over a couple of days.