Lamb and Chickpeas

 For various reasons, life had left me with a pound of dried chickpeas in my pantry and a 5-pound hunk of lamb shoulder in my chest freezer, and I vaguely recalled that there was a famous lamb and chickpeas recipe making the rounds. It turns out my mother-in-law had adapted it from The Zahav Lamb Shoulder. But even the adaptation was a little complicated for me, so I tried to streamline further.

Step one: Dry-brine

Take one big hunk of boneless shoulder (bone-in would be fine, I'm sure), mine was five pounds. Rub on 4 tablespoons of salt, 2 teaspoons of black pepper, ground fennel, ground allspice, and minced or powdered garlic. Let it sit covered in your fridge for at least 24 hours. It will start to get stinky, funky, and a little funny-looking, but in a good way.

Step two: Slow-cook

Put lamb shoulder, dried chickpeas, and 8 cups of water plus 1/2 cup pomegranate molasses in your slow-cooker for approximately 9-10 hours. In my case, that actually overfilled my Instantpot, so I siphoned out about two cups of braising liquid and it was all fine. Not sure what the correct amount of liquid is.

Step three: Shellac

Preheat your oven to 500 degrees. Take out the lamb, which at this point should fall apart in your tongs, and put it in a roasting pan. Brush it with a couple more tablespoons of pomegranate molasses and a couple more tablespoons of the braising liquid, for about 30 minutes. Re-baste/brush 1-2 times in there if you can.

Meanwhile, drain off all the liquid from your chickpeas and skim off the fat. I use this fat separator, a great new kitchen gadget via Megan McCardle. If you don't have a fat separator you can do more cumbersome things like chill the whole dish and peel off the fat, but ugh, why? If you have a slow-cooker, buy a fat separator. 

Then add some of the liquid back to the chickpeas, pour some of it on the lamb, and use the rest for some other delicious project. 

Step four: Serve

Rich unctuous chickpeas, crispy-tender lamb, and whatever else you want. I supplied a tomato-cucumber salad, challah from Masa Madre and a hot sauce made of equal parts Cholula and Belazu Smoked Harissa. YMMV.

Sour Cherry Compote

 Okay, a sour cherry smoothie is fun and all, and the sour cherry pie was really excellent if I do say so myself, but what do you really do with a couple of gallons a week of frozen sour cherries? Make compote.

Let cherries thaw, and drain off the juice into a pot.

At some point, add 3/4 cup sugar, and 1/2 to 1 tsp of vanilla.

Boil, until it becomes thick, almost a syrup. (The last step will happen fast -- once it starts to thicken, watch carefully.)

Put the cherries back in, let it boil again, and stir a few times until it has a thick chunky consistency. Cool. Freeze some, maybe. Eat -- in yogurt, oatmeal, over ice cream, or just by the spoonful.

Farmshare Box Pasta

So for various reasons we ended up subscribed to three different CSAs this summer, meaning that every week is a kind of fun race to find uses for so many different varieties of dark leafy greens and endless piles of spring and tropea onions. Many of these can be tossed on the grill along with some protein for an easy and satisfying summer meal. But you can't do that ALL the time, and you can't do that with, say, watercress. What to do?

Farmshare Box Pasta:

1/2 pound pasta
1 pound heavily seasoned ground meat (I use chicken italian sausage in a loose roll from Whole Foods).
Lots of vegetables from your farmshare box.
1 lemon, 1/2 cup olive oil, 1/2 cup capers.

This is pretty self-explanatory, but you need to figure out what to do depending on your vegetables. Got onions, carrots, or other things vaguely resembling mirepoix? They get diced and cooked with the ground meat.

Got zucchini, eggplant, or other fleshy vegetables like that? Saute them in rounds or cubes and add them to the bowl.

Got leafy greens, like kale or chard? Dice 'em up and wilt them.

Got tomato, watercress, etc.? Chop it up and toss them in raw.

The keys are:

• Keep working through your ingredients a few at a time. I know you, like me, ignore the many recipes that say this but don't crowd the pan.
• 
  
• Season each one separately.
• 
  
• Use lots of different vegetables. A variety of tastes and textures is what makes the dish.
• 
  
• Use way more vegetables than you think is reasonable. You'll usually wish you used more.

I like to bring the dish together with basically a vinaigrette of lemon, olive oil, and chopped capers. But you can experiment with pestos, garlic white wine reductions, etc. Just something simple but flavorful to unite the whole dish.

It's never the same twice, but it's almost always pretty good.

Sour Cherry Smoothie

You all know what to do when life hands you lemons, but what about when somebody in your household decides to splurge on a 2-gallon bucket of pitted sour cherries from your weekly fruitshare? There are some obvious answers, like cherry compote and cherry pie, and those are in motion. But the less obvious, and most immediate, answer, is this:

Sour Cherry Smoothie
1 cup pitted sour cherries
1/2 cup leftover cherry juice
1/2 cup frozen blueberries
1/2 banana
handful of ice cubes

Put them all in a tall glass, and attack them with your overused immersion blender. Drink immediately, with much lip-smacking.

Seven ways of looking at a brisket

So the smoked brisket from Snow's BBQ was everything I could have hoped for -- dense, less fatty than I feared, and full of wonderful smoke. It thus prompted the question of how many different ways there are to have brisket for lunch.

1. Sliced, gently microwaved with a little BBQ sauce. Served with pickle.
2. Chopped, gently microwaved with a little BBQ sauce. Served on a piece of toast, with pickle.
3. Chopped, microwaved and mixed with some soupy black beans. Eaten straight up.
4. Chopped, microwaved, and mixed with some soupy black beans. Eaten a tortilla.
5. Sliced, served on a roll with some BBQ sauce and a pickle.
6. Sliced, served on a roll with mustard and a plenty of giardiniera.
7. Chopped, gently microwaved and served in a tortilla with a little bit of melted cheese. Add a few squirts of hot sauce.

Okay, is that really seven different ways? You'd have to ask a combinatorics professor. But I can tell you I basically ate brisket every day for two weeks and lived to tell the tale.

The Return of Baron Samedi

Digging through some old correspondence I recently rediscovered a tiki recipe for the Baron Samedi, canonically made with 1.75 oz. aged Rhum Agricole, .75 oz. lime juice, 0.25 oz. cinnamon syrup, and 0.25 oz falernum.  (I make basically all tiki drinks in a warhouse Oxo cobbler shaker -- something I definitely need to change, but life is short and cocktail hour is even shorter.)

I made this with a nice Martinique Agricole, and with the "tiki spices cocktail syrup" from BG Reynolds, and thought I was basically set.

Then a funny ordering miscommunication landed me a bottle of Clairin Milot from Haiti. When I first sniffed it I couldn't imagine what to do with it -- it smelled like grappa and olive brine, not rum. But I figured it would be thematically appropriate for a cocktail named Baron Samedi, and Clairin does have some of the fresh grassiness of an agricole, so I decided to try it here.

Wow. The spices and lime work shockingly well with the Clairin, giving it a funky, fermented, bitter edge to an otherwise tart and clean drink. I found I needed to move the tiki spices syrup up to about 0.5 oz to make it a little more pleasant to drink, but the result is definitely going on my home menu:

1.75 oz. Clairin
0.75 oz lime juice
0.5 oz tiki spices cocktail syrup
0.25 oz. falernum.

Shake, serve up and very cold.

Maybe Even Better Brisket

How to Have Barbecue ... Shipped To Your Front Door, in the Texas Monthly. Including Kreuz Market, Black's, Evie Mae's, Snow's, and many other places I've never heard of.

The Best Brisket Ever

This Passover season I got sick of my usual treatments for brisket so I decided to innovate a new one, based loosely on the old success of this recipe, in turn derived from that improbably viral recipe for Mississippi Roast. A member of my household pronounced it the "best brisket ever" and asked me to write down the recipe so here it is:

1. Take one 2-ish pound brisket (mine came from Trader Joe's I think).
2. Place in slow-cooker, fat-side up.
3. On top of brisket, pour 1 tbsp Penzey's Chicago Steak seasoning, plus 1 tsp each of ancho chile powder and New Mexico chile powder. 
4. Place two tbsp butter on top.
5. Set slow-cooker on high for a while. (I think mine was about four or five hours, but longer would have been good too.) 
6. Chop it up or tear it apart with some tongs.
7. Serve over rice with veggies, salsa, and pickled onions, or use for tacos.

I'm not sure, but I *think* the key to the recipe's deliciousness is the smoke flavoring in the Chicago Steak seasoning. But whatever it is, I'll make this again. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how well it would scale, so I don't know if I can make it for a crowd.