Exercises in lamb

This blog was almost dead but was resuscitated by a rack of lamb sent up by my mother, and a vigilant photographer in the form of Jason.

I unfortunately haven't been cooking very much lately, because of the amount of hours I have been working - dinners have been consisting of food ordered and comped by the firm, or whatever frozen items I can find in my freezer. When I tell people about my job at a consulting firm, I think there are a lot of people who ask me about the perks, specifically about the free meals that I often get because I work late. The novelty of this wears off fast. I've burned through the selection of decent takeaway restaurants in the Back Bay area really quickly, and I felt like I could never enjoy the meal because I was too busy trying to finish some piece of analysis for an impending deadline. The constant late nights and ordering out have really made me appreciate my own home cooking, which I really hope I'll get to do more of than in the past month.

I became so fed up with working so much that I finally purchased a new knife, as a little reward for myself for working so much - a gorgeous 8 inch Wüsthof chef's knife. Kitchen Arts on Newbury sells refurbished knives, which is where I got my Wüsthof and it's a fantastic deal. The knives are in excellent conditions and it allows people like me who want to buy nicer knives but not spend $100 - $200 because of the wear and tear they'll put the knife through. Even though the knife wasn't as expensive as it could have been, I'm still not taking any chances with keeping it in our kitchen where everything seems to burn, break, or spontaneously combust. With good knives, you really should wash them as soon as you're done using them and dry them off as opposed to leaving them in the sink and since this would never happen in our kitchen, I'm actually currently hiding the knife in my underwear drawer and bringing it out only when in use. But so far, so good.

Back to the lamb.

The first thing I cooked wasn't done with the rack of lamb my mother sent up but rather inspired by this recipe by Mark Bittman. This was a perfect thing to cook on a rainy spring day, because it's a soup and it's warm and comforting but the acid you add at the end and the dill really brighten the dish up and it's much lighter and refreshing than you'd think a lamb stew is.

I was having a conversation with my friend Christine today about dill and we both agreed that dill really is one of those herbs that you can add to anything. I never used it much before it came in my Aerogarden because I never thought to buy it at the grocery store before. I could never figure out what I would do with the huge bunches that dill is sold in at supermarkets, but now that I can snip from the Aerogarden, dill makes a frequent appearance in everything that I cook.

Now onto the rack of lamb.

My mom came to visit Boston a few weeks ago, and like every Asian mother, she is always convinced that her daughter doesn't have enough to eat. She brought up among various breakfast items, homemade roasted red bell peppers, and shumai, a rack of lamb. I really wanted to do a full meal with it, with a really delicious starter to some kind of full, impressive and time consuming side. I remembered from Top Chef that Arianne did a cauliflower puree that sounded delicious so I knew I wanted to do that, like a more interesting variation of mashed potatoes. This was absolutely delicious - creamy and flavorful. I seasoned mine with thyme, nutmeg, salt and pepper and let the cauliflower just simmer in the cream on low heat for almost an hour, then removed the cauliflower and pureed it.

For the lamb, I made a rub with rosemary, salt and pepper, then broiled the rack in my new cast iron skillet. I also made a mint pesto to drizzle on top.

Finally, I made a side of roasted asparagus, just to have some green on the side.

I also had an unsuccessful attempt at making a gougère, made using the same choux pastry that I had made my cream puffs with. I made them with Gruyère, what gougères are traditionally made with, but I also included dill. Unfortunately, I think I used too much cheese in the gougères, so they didn't rise properly and were more like Gruyère and dill scones, instead of the light airy puffs that I was envisioning.

The end products: