I hope all of you had a blessed Easter Sunday, with time to reflect on the day’s spiritual significance and a chance to connect with friends and family. We had a great gathering at around 5:30, and there was one super-duper hit and some kind of misses. I’m writing this in the hope that you’ll try out the hit and be warned about the others. I was especially disappointed with the cake, as I don’t make desserts very often and had been looking forward to this one for weeks.
Anyway, here goes: the hit was the lamb, and my word! I had bought two large boneless leg of lamb roasts totaling about 11 pounds, and most of it disappeared. We’re going to have the leftovers for dinner tonight, but they don’t amount to much. I seem to have started falling back on some type of marinated and sliced roast as the main course for company dinners, starting with a recipe from HalfBakedHarvest for Korean-marinated flank steak. That recipe was a huge hit last summer when I made it for a special dinner as part of the 25th wedding anniversary celebration for my in-laws. (I leave out the honey and don’t always make the chimichurri sauce.) The nice thing about this type of entree is that it’s easy to serve and the marinade/sauce adds lots of flavor. Anyway, you may remember that I made a variation of HBH’s beef tenderloin for a birthday dinner last December, and now I’ve made this lamb roast. Man, I can hardly wait to make lamb again! As I’m sitting here typing this I’m thinking that I should get back into the groove of making Sunday dinner. Since we moved over here into the lower level of Jim’s parents’ house we haven’t been having as many people over as we used to when we were in our own house. But now that it’s getting warm we need to pull up our socks and get the patio fixed up so we can eat out there more often.
Back to the lamb. I mentioned that I was using Melissa Clark’s recipe, but I didn’t follow it exactly. Here’s what I rubbed on the lamb the night before (as far as I can remember):
2 tablespoons preserved lemon puree, or you can substitute 1 tablespoon grated lemon zest + 1 tablespoon kosher salt, or ¼ tsp. lemon oil + 1 tablespoon kosher salt.
1 teaspoon or so freshly-ground black pepper
7-8 cloves of garlic, pressed with a garlic press (No, it’s not easier to smash it and mash it and chop it)
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
¼ cup (or so) thyme leaves—but you don’t have to do this. Honestly, I don’t know how long I spent stripping the leaves and tender stems off the woody central stems of the fresh thyme I grow. I’m not sure that it’s worth it. I could have just used parsley. Next time I’ll have a new rosemary plant and will use that, as rosemary and lamb go together particularly well.
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
Puree together in the small bowl of your food processor or with a stick blender. Or you can just stir it together, but it won’t be as homogenous.
Trim any thick fat off the lamb, put it in a glass baking dish that’s big enough to spread it out, and rub the above mixture all over it. (I think I made about 1 ½ times the above for the two roasts.) Wrap tightly in double layers of plastic wrap and aluminum foil and refrigerate overnight if possible. Even an hour will help, though—if you do that, you don’t have to bother refrigerating it. Otherwise, take the meat out of the fridge an hour before you plan to start roasting it. Preheat oven to 425 and roast the lamb on a sheet pan for 30 minutes, then check. (Don’t use a regular baking dish with high sides, although that’s probably what you’ll have used for the marinating.) You want the thickest parts to be 130-135 degrees. Take out, cover with foil, and let sit for at least 15 minutes. If you’ve miscalculated and the lamb is done early, it can sit covered in a warm place such as the back of the stove for 30-45 minutes without any harm. Slice fairly thinly—no more than ¼”—across the grain, and put on a platter. (I did make a version of her salsa verde with cilantro and parsley; it was okay, but you don’t have to bother with it if you don’t want to.)
Meanwhile, and this is not something Melissa told me to do, make a sauce from the wonderful juices that have accumulated in the pan. I poured them into my gravy separator, let sit for 5 minutes or so, then strained out the defatted part into a saucepan and added 2 cups of beef broth made with “Better than Bouillon” concentrate plus a couple of heaping tablespoons cornstarch. Be sure to thoroughly stir the cornstarch into the cold water you’re using for your bouillon before adding it to the hot juices. Bring to a boil, let thicken, and taste. I was afraid that it would be too salty/strong with the flavors from the marinade, but it was just perfect.
Now for the misses:
- I’m not going to bother again with the Kenji Lopez-Alt method for pre-boiling potatoes in water with baking soda before roasting them. I’ve now tried the recipe three times and have decided that it’s a lot of hassle without all that much payoff. I’m going to go back to my old way from Cook’s Illustrated that starts the potatoes out in a 400 degree oven, using foil to cover it which allows the potatoes to steam for maybe 20 minutes, then removing the foil and continuing to bake until browned. I felt that the Lopez-Alt potatoes just ended up getting hard, not crunchy. I roasted baby carrots and shallots too, and they were fine. Be aware that baby carrots give off a lot of water, so if you want to speed things up you’ll need to dump the water off after 15-20 minutes of roasting. But even with that step it’s so much easier using them than peeling and carefully slicing mounds of regular carrots. I’d already peeled and grated two whole pounds of carrots for the cake, after all. (But I did use the food processor for grating.)
- The carrot cake was a disappointment. It tasted perfectly okay, but I had expected something truly transcendent. (I gave the links to the cake and the frosting in my previous post and am not re-posting them here since I’m going to make some changes.) The big thing that I thought was going to give me heaven on a plate was the browned butter. Carrot cakes usually call for oil, not butter, and this one had the additional flavor of browning. So I browned a whole pound of butter, patiently standing at the stove and stirring it, being sure not to burn it and getting it just perfect, and honestly! I might just as well have used oil. I thought there’d be this toasted deep flavor and it wasn’t there, at least that I could detect. And the cake didn’t have enough spices. And in the end, although usually I love nuts in baked goods, I felt that the toasted pecans just interfered with the cake. And the frosting was also a little bit disappointing. It was lovely and smooth, but ironically enough I felt that it wasn’t sweet enough. I was pleased with the way it spread and kept its shape, but in the end I didn’t think it really tasted like frosting. I love carrot cake, though. I really do. So I’m going to try the recipe again sometime with a few tweaks: I won’t bother with browning the butter and may instead just use Martha Stewart’s recipe that calls for creaming the butter, I’ll up the spices, and I’ll try the buttercream frosting again but put more sugar in the custard base. (This is the only non-powdered-sugar recipe I’ve found.) And I won’t make such a large recipe. Let me tell you, this cake was massive, with that whole pound of butter and six eggs. Three thick layers. Even with 15 people we still had maybe 25% of it left. Four big slices are sitting there on the cake stand, and I told Jim that I’m not going to try to freeze it. Whatever is left by tomorrow is getting thrown. So there!
What about you? Did you have some hits and some misses for your last company dinner? What are you planning to do next time?