Sunday Dinner

[ksmith]

This came out well:

Ingredients:
2 lamb shanks or less pricey lambs knuckles
2 Tablespoons of finely chopped rosemary
2 large onions
Zest and juice of 1 Orange
3 Tablespoons of Olive Oil
1/8 a bottle of Shiraz
?? cup of beef stock (this amount came out garbled--I saw 1/2 cup, but since I had opened an 8 oz container, I used the whole thing)
Freshly ground black pepper
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6 Potatoes peeled and cut into chunks
2 teaspoons of Chives
Salt
Butter
2 teaspoons of Parsley
5 cloves of garlic

Directions:
Scatter the Lamb Shanks with rosemary. Finely slice the onions. Grate the zest of the orange. Heat the oil and brown the lamb shanks on all sides. Remove the shanks.

Add the onion to the pan. Cook the onion with the orange zest UNTIL THE ONION IS BROWN AND CRISPY (I didn't do this because I have a cheap fry pan and stuff was burning rather than browning, but it still tasted good). Add the wine, beef stock and the juice of the orange, with salt and pepper to taste, to the onion and bring it to a simmer.

Put the onion mix in a heavy lidded roasting pan and add the lamb shanks. Place in a 180-Celsius (350F) oven for one hour and fifteen minutes.

Boil the potatoes to create your Garlicky Potato foundation for your Lamb Shanks. Mash or puree them depending on your taste. Mix in your Chives and Parsley and chopped raw Garlic. Add butter and salt to taste.

To serve, pile garlicky potato puree on to two serving plates and top with a Lamb Shank and the sauce in the bottom of the roasting pan.



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I just cooked some gemstone potatoes (those 1 lb bags that contain several varieties), then added a little chopped garlic, half and half, and butter. Steamed Brussells sprouts as veg--a little too sharp for this. The meat did come very easily off the bone--it's a rich meat, and it tasted great.

Comments

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Really brown onions (http://www.tigersandstrawberries.com/2008/03/24/cutting-and-browning-onions-for-proper-flavor-in-indian-food/) are mostly a practice thing, not a pan thing. It's a little easier in cast iron for me, but I cook damn near everything in cast iron so there's the practice effect again. That blog post does a really good job of explaining the physics and chemistry tho...

(and darn it, lamb isn't in season now for *months*...)

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

This is great--thanks!

This was my problem:

Secondly, use a heavy-bottomed pan which heats evenly. Thin-bottomed pans will heat up quickly, but they also tend to form hot spots on their bottom surfaces, which will lead to the sugars not only sticking, but burning. And this can happen within a matter of seconds.

The pan I used was copper-bottomed RevereWare, which seemed pretty thin. It tipped back and forth on the burner, and I had to hold onto the handle to keep the bottom flush against the burner at all times. Over time, I'm going to replace my pans with either cast iron or something like All-Clad. Maybe All-Clad seconds.

I think fully cooked onions would have added a lot, although the sauce was pretty decent as it was.

[michaeldthomas.livejournal.com]

We are big fans of Le Creuset (http://www.lecreuset.com/) cookware. They cook like a dream, and they last a lifetime. They have stores at some of the outlet malls, and occasionally pieces will show up at TJ Maxx and Home Goods.