lamb – Abstract Gourmet

Rack of Lamb

This is a fake post. Just to make you think I’ve written something when I really haven’t. But seriously, look at that lamb ! Is it not the sexiest looking thing you’ve ever seen in meat form ? I think so too.

I cook my lamb racks whole, first rubbing them all over with olive oil, salt, pepper, and then smooshing as much rosemary as I can into them. I then searing it all over in a very hot pan til it’s nice and brown. Finish it off in the oven for about 15 minutes on 180C to cook through to a lovely pink and juicy rare. Slice down through the gaps and enjoy the succulent pleasure of natures lamby bounty… always remembering that If God hadn’t wanted us to eat animals, he wouldn’t have made them out of meat.

Incidentally, these would go fantastically well with a West Australian wine. I’d pick a Great Southern Shiraz from Frankland River (a Howard Park Scotsdale if I was feeling fancy), or something from Margaret River like a lovely Cape Grace Cabernet Sauvignon.

Also if you’re interested in seeing how crappy my photography used to be, check out this lamb based blast from the past: Rack of lamb with honey/balsamic sauce

Slow Food – Asado las ovejas

Take one ram lamb in the prime of it’s youth, one fire stoked up and a pile of hot embers, combine with rosemary and about 5 hours worth of cooking, and you have a recipe for deliciousness.

Add to that a group of wonderful food loving people who all bring things to eat and drink that they’ve either made or produced and you have the makings of a great day.

I’m very lucky to know some wonderful people. People that have introduced me to many great moments of eating pleasure. Ranking high on that list of late are the wonderful people at Slow Food Perth, and in particular their illustrious leaders Jamie Kronborg and Pauline Tresize.

I’ve lately enjoyed a day of truffle extravagance as Slow Food Perth hosted a truffle lunch at the Mundaring Truffle Festival, and then today was fortunate to be invited along for an Argentinian bbq up in the Perth hills.

No words and no time to describe it all, so take a look at the photos for what can only be described as a perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Great food, great wine, great people… and 84 year olds wearing novelty glasses who give you hope that maybe you’ll be as cool as them one day :)

My next update will be from Europe… the countdown has begun.

There’s a buco in my osso

Osso buco, that perfect slab of unctuousness coaxed into melt in your mouth tenderness by a luxurious slow cooking. Would you believe that up until a few years ago I had no idea what it even was ? I assumed it was one of those things on the menu at an Italian restaurant that I would never order. Much like gnocchi and saltimbocca (not that I have anything against them, I just haven’t had a good one).

So it wasn’t until I started getting interested in the slow food movement, and slow cooking specifically as a means to softening up less appealing cuts of meat, that I decided it was time to try making osso buco for myself. I’ve had some success with my oxtail dish – coda alla vaccinara, which ranks on my list of tastiest dishes I’ve made in recent times, so I was hoping that the marrow would work it’s magic in this too, and I haven’t been disappointed.

Now normally my recipes on the site are pretty slap dash. Yes they work, and most of them I’d be happy to cook again… but for whatever reason I don’t. I get bored, I wander off, I forget. My attention span is about as short as a three year old in a cafe drawing pictures with colouring pens (actually probably less, because she was good Ed :)). So it’s a testament to taste if I write about something more than once, and if it gets adopted into my regular stable of dishes, then it’s pure gold.

So clearly risotto in it’s many forms is on that list… as is anything containing chorizo in it, and poached eggs. A chorizo risotto with a poached egg on top may just my ultimate mash up dish, but now I’m getting distracted again…

Back to the Osso Buco.

The recipe I based mine around is a simpler version of the common ones, with a few small twists. I personally don’t think carrots and celery add much to the flavour (well they do, but not in a good way), and I much prefer red wine to white wine for the cooking. This is for once something that I’ve taken to refining a little over the many times I’ve made it now. So you my appreciative audience can benefit from my willingness to rinse and repeat this one a few times over to get it just right.
You still don’t get exact measurements though… they’re for the weak :)

Osso Buco alla Matt

The ingredients

4 chunky pieces of osso buco – Veal seems to popular but if you’re a little different you can think outside the box and take the hole in the bone definition to whichever kind of meat you like. Other examples would be venison, or a very tasty lamb osso buco, that I tried recently after asking the boys at “Meat The Butcher” (still love that name) in Dog Swamp Shopping centre to slice up some lamb shanks for me.
flour for dusting
2 onions – chopped finely
4 – 5 cloves garlic – chopped finely
2 cans tinned roma tomatoes (home made if you got em), and extra passata
a bottle of red wine (you won’t use it all, but it’s good to have while you’re cooking)
sea salt and cracked pepper.
some parsley if you like

How I make mine

So dust the osso buco in flour and shake off any excess, then in a hot pan fry them in olive oil until they’re a golden brown colour all over. Then take them out of the pan to rest a bit and wait for their time back in the sun.

Now add some more oil to the pan and throw in your chopped onions and a little garlic. Cook them slowly down until they’re soft and then bring back the osso buco, laying them on top of a little onion bed, and dousing thoroughly with red wine (1 or 2 cups), pureed tomatoes (1 or 2 cans), and a sprinkling of garlic.

You now turn the heat right down on the pan, making sure that the osso buco are arranged so that they lie flat in the pan, and are mostly covered by the liquid, adding more tomato passata or wine to bring the level up. This is where the magic happens.
Try and find something productive to do for the next few hours while the wine and heat work their way into the sinews and activate the marrow in the middle of the bones. Personally I don’t think you can cook this for long enough (given that you have plenty of liquid so it doesn’t dry out). The longer you cook it, the more mouth wateringly tender it will become.

Along the way, you may want to give it a season with salt and pepper, and somewhere towards the end sprinkle over some more garlic and parsley, give that another half an hour and you’re done.

Be careful taking them out of the pan, as by this stage (2 hours + later) they should be falling away from the bone without you doing anything.

I’ve served mine over a variety of side dishes, a sweet potato mash, a regular potato mash, a pearl barley risotto alla milanese (not as great as it sounds), and I’m also thinking polenta would be fantastic.

Traditionally in Milan it’s served over the risotto alla milanese ( a rich saffron risotto ) with gremolata on top. Not that I’m much of one for tradition, but they are seriously onto something with this combination.

Give this one a shot, it’s 2 hours of your life you won’t get back, but the 30 minutes of eating it afterwards will totally make up for it :)

Lamb Osso Buco - Pearl Barley Risotto alla Milanese

A (Curry) Night to Remember

I had the idea recently of organising a little curry night. I’ve been getting into all sorts of curry over the past couple of years, spurred on by Sharon introducing me to some excellent Malaysian curry. I’d never really understood the curry before then. I just figured it was a hot spicey kind of soup that other people ate, and that I didn’t like. I’m not sure why I had that idea, but I think it’s an important one to get rid of if you ever want to experience all the world of food has to offer.

Since then I haven’t looked back, having tried out a whole range of Malaysian, Thai, Southern Indian, North Indian, and Vietnamese curries, a good number of Moroccan tajines (which are almost kinda like curry), and doing my best to avoid Japanese curry, which still defies all logic.

So just last Saturday night a few of our closest curry making friends dropped by to share the love, and the food in their own special way. Sharon and I spent the better part of the day procuring supplies from Kongs (the local Asian supermarket), and preparing the base for her curry. I’m always amazed walking around in those places… it’s like, just when you think you have a pretty decent grasp on a type of food, you step one foot into a store, look around, realise you don’t know what even half of the stuff is for, and suddenly feel very small again.

A recent discovery along those lines for me personally was Asafoetida… which i’m sure is pretty common to my sub continental readers, but was a complete mystery to me. Turns out it’s a kind of spice made from the resin extracted out of the stems and roots of the Ferula plant, and is used particularly by Indians who are practitioners of Jainism, as a replacement for certain foods (onions, ginger, garlic) that they aren’t allowed to eat.

That has nothing to do with this post of course, other than to state formally that I still know bugger all about a great many things… and any education my learned readers are able to give is always appreciated.

So on to the curries.

Dan and Mabel brought a lovely lamb curry, I would say vindaloo, but I might be wrong, so i’ll stay general for now.
Dave and Mel also brought a lamb curry, this was a southern Indian style dish with no coconut milk and a predominant clove, cinnamon flavour to it.
Jen and Ben brought a Bicol Express (!). My first experience with Filipino curry and apparently one of the few of such dishes that exist in the Phillipines, It’s basically pork, chicken, beans, chilli, tumeric, and… ummm, stuff. Very tasty indeed and sadly too hot for the creator to manage, but well done Jen for taking one for the team.

Sharon made a Malaysian chicken curry. This one had a lot of ginger, chilli, kaffir lime leaves, galangal, garlic, onion, tumeric… all blended into a wonderful paste that got smeared all over the chicken (one the bone) while they cooked away for a good few hours til nice and fall apart-ified.
I was stuck for options, not having a home land from which to draw curry making experience from I either had to choose from my list of previous conquests that turned out ok, or tread the lonely road of experimental curry making.

Plucking up all my courage, I turned the pages of Mel’s curry book she had kindly lent me, and settled on one that looked sufficiently different yet still tasty… Duck curry. A slightly odd choice perhaps, and not the most well known of all curries, but it was in the book dammit, and apparently is quite popular in the Kerala region of India where water fowl are more prevalent, and clearly not fast enough to not get eaten.

So I started with Duck breast… three of em, skinned and cubed. Fried a little fenugreek and fennel seeds in some oil and then added a whole onion, two green chillis, and a good dose of shredded ginger. When that was nice and soft I added some more chilli powder and a dash of turmeric. To that lovely concoction went the duck breast, to get coated and loved with all the spices and flavours. The rest was simple, throw in a few baby potatoes, a handful of curry leaves and a spash or three of coconut cream, and Babu’s your uncle. It turned out pretty darn good even if I do say so myself, and I do… Of course I am the worlds most biased food critic, and can quite easily overlook the slighty dry and somewhat gamey texture of the duck, which perhaps would have been nicer had I used it on the bone and cooked it for a couple more hours. Still, it was a triumph for experimental curriests the world over, and a great first effort.

We finished off with these lovely little mango and coconut puddings that Mel lovingly coaxed out their shells and served with a good dollop of ice cream.

All in all a great night, and like all things curry, the best was yet to come. Two days later and I’m still going strong with the left overs, and as much as a fan of Johnny Cash I am, there hasn’t been one ring of fire to speak of. Thanks to everyone for putting in the effort and all I can say is the next one will have some huge expectations… Anyone know where I can buy Iguana ?

A Moroccan Dinner

What do you cook to impress you friends ? What if those friends happen to be chefs ?
Such was the quandary I faced recently when deciding what to cook for some new friends. One of whom just happens to work at a very well respected rustic Italian restaurant in this fine city (of Perth). So risotto was out the window… and that floury pasta I manage to pull together occasionally just wasn’t going to cut it anymore… even if it was made with beetroot.

So Italian was off the menu… it was too warm for a roast… too passe for duck, and too expensive for my other idea of stuffing abalone, foie gras, truffles inside a whole sirloin of grade 12 wagyu… (another night perhaps).

So the idea came to me… Moroccan. Carrying on from recent Moroccan adventures, I decided to continue my little virtual journey through that magical slice of North Africa. It was just the right combination of something a little different that was easy to prepare a head of time, and might sound slightly exotic to anyone who doesn’t think about it for too long :)

After getting a bunch of great ideas from Deb, my ethno food consultant extraordinairre. I managed to pull together what would prove to be a pretty decent little combination of dishes.

So the menu for the evening was as follows:

Entree:
– Baked turkish bread with olive oil and dhukkah
– Lemon Myrtle Cheddar and Triple Brie on craquers (crackers)
– Sumac fried squid on cherry tomato salad with lemon viniagrette

Main:
– Chermoula king snapper
– Honey apricot lamb tajine
– Deb’s roast vegetable couscous

Palate Cleanser:
– Orange and rosewater palate cleansers

Dessert
– Blood orange tart with double cream

Out of courtesy to my guests, I didn’t take photos of every dish all night long. Because as much as I like to record the meal, I think you lose something in the mood and conversation if you are constantly snapping shots of every dish. So you’ll have to make do with the snippets here, along with a relatively detailed description of what went into making each.

Continue reading A Moroccan Dinner

Fennel, Lime & Tatsoi Risotto with Backstrap of Lamb

I think learning to make my first risotto was one of the steps that launched me into the world of real cooking. I’d seen so many TV chefs making fancy looking dishes and thought they sounded so involved and elaborate as to be out of reach to the common home cook. So when I first decided to throw caution to the wind and have a go myself, It was with great delight and virtual high fives that I managed to make something actually come out the way it looked in the books.

These days though, I’m almost reaching risotto overkill. It’s still my goto dish when I can’t think of anything else to cook, but it doesn’t hold the same interest as it used to, to the point where it’s almost getting a little passe. I whip out my usual set of ingredients, follow the standard mantra of onions, garlic, leek, butter, rice, wine, and stock, and away we go. Add a bit of this, a bit of that… more stock, and it’s all done.

So I won’t bore you with the details of how I made this dish, other than to say check out any of my other risotto recipes for a more indepth explanation of the process. I think the name says it all really…

Fennel, Lime & Tatsoi Risotto with Rare Spiced Backstrap of Lamb

Points of interest are that I used backstrap of lamb, which is one of the tenderest, juiciest, most deliciousousest (I just wrote that you make you all sound like freaks while you’re reading this) cuts of lamb you will find. It’s not cheap mind… It comes in long thin pieces and was $35/kg from Mondo’s in Inglewood… I have yet to find a cheap Chinese butcher equivalent because apparently they aren’t so keen on lamb.

I basically seasoned the lamb strips with my normal quasi-middle eastern spice profile of olive oil, cumin, fennel, coriander seeds, and lots of salt and pepper. Then seared it quickly in a hot pan with a little butter on both sides… Not for too long as it’s quite a lean piece of meat, and should be served towards rare (in my carnivorous opinion).

Other notes were the lime and fennel in the risotto. I added quite a bit of lime zest and then the juice of a whole lime to lighten the risotto up. I didn’t want it to be too heavy as the lamb would be there for that. The fennel was added later on so it didn’t break down entirely, just got quite soft, and then some Tatsoi was stirred through right at the last minute. You might be familiar with Tatsoi as a salad ingredient. It’s a leafy asian green related to bok choy somehow (I think she married his uncles second cousin)… and it has a real peppery kick to it. Something a bit different anyway.

It all turned out so nicely that I made it twice in the same week :) When food tastes this nice, you can call me passe anyday…

Rack of Lamb with Honey & Balsamic Sauce

There’s something about a nice rack of lamb that makes it hard for me to pass by, when idlely drifting through butchers shops, purveying their cuts. Lamb is one of my favourite dishes full stop, but to be able to combine it with a ready made handle AND have it look classy on a plate at the same time, is just genious.

So this was a pretty simple dish I made up on the spur of the moment (read: spent all day thinking about and scouring the web for ideas), which I think turned out just dandy.

Lamb Rack

Rack of Lamb (or two)
Olive oil (a given really, just buy a few gallons of good quality olive oil and you will be doing yourself a big favour)
Rosemary (Is it possible to do a lamb dish without rosemary ?… I think not)
Salt (do yourself another favour and go and get some Maldon Salt… beautiful texture and flavour for cooking)
Cracked Pepper (do yourself a huge favour and buy a pepper mill, and load it up with peppercorns)
Balsamic Vinegar
Honey
Red Wine (nothing specific, but preferably something drinkable)

To Serve With

Sweet Potatos
Butter
Cream
Rosemary
Fennel

How I made it

So firstly, cut down into your lamb rack a little and stuff every concievable orifice you can find with fresh rosemary, salt, black pepper, and libations of olive oil. Score the fat on the back of the rack, and rub that down with salt and pepper too. Now crank your stove up to high and sear your lamb rack in a healthy dose of olive oil in a hot pan. Make sure you give it a good covering so that the tricky parts all receive a fair amount of heat, and then when it’s looking charred to perfection, drop the heat, and put it into the oven to continue cooking through til done. Keep the pan juices as we’ll use those for the sauce.

Once the lamb is away in the oven, peel and slice your sweet potato and fennel. Get the sweet potato boiling in a pot of salted water, and braise the fennel in a little white wine and butter over a low/medium heat so it softens up. Once the sweet potato is cooked, but not mushy, drain the water and mash with extra rosemary, butter, cream, salt, pepper, and a little grated parmesan.

Next the sauce… Pretty simple really… Into the pan juices goes a good few dashes of balsamic vinegar and a good squeeze of honey (I’d give you measurements, but i really didn’t use any… I generally cook to taste and measure things by eye). Give this a taste and you have a lovely sweet balsamic flavour coming through… which I then pulled back to savoury land with the help of a splash of shiraz and dash of beef stock. Reduce the sauce down, and keep stirring to make sure the honey doesn’t seperate, and perhaps thicken with some corn flour and water… and you’re done.

At this point I cut all the lamb racks up into french cutlets (if thats what french cutlets are of course… ) and attempted to pile it onto a plate in some sort of attractive formation. Sadly failing… after taking some photos, I heaped the rest of the lamb on top and Sharon and I devoured them as best we could.

Delish.