On my way in to work this morning, I had a Big Idea™ for dinner tonight. The plan was to cut a lamb shoulder chop into rectangular slices and sear them. These slices would rest on a bed of sautéed sliced onion, slivered garlic, diced radish, and julienned purple and yellow carrot. On the side would be a small "salad" of wilted radicchio with diced yellow bell pepper, chopped wood ear mushrooms, and sliced garlic. Sounds great, right? I was so excited all day long about how amazing dinner would be.
Mistake #1a: I cut the lamb before I cooked it. I had this vision of searing sexy slices of sheep in sizzling oil. Instead, I had to take them out before they properly browned to prevent overcooking them. Pro: I didn't dry out the meat; Con: it didn't look as good and the flavor didn't really pop.
Mistake #1b: I cut the lamb before I cooked it. Getting the bone pulled out became quite an ordeal as opposed to cutting it out of a cooked piece of meat. Luckily, I did manage to remove it without totally mangling the meat. Pro: I have some good uncooked bones to make lamb broth with sometime (booyah!); Con: the process was a total pain in the ass.
Success #1: having trimmed the meat before cooking, I was left with a few chunks of fat. If you hadn't heart, fat = flavor. I was able to render those blocks of fat in each of the vegetable dishes to really kick them up a couple of notches.
Mistake #2: I used too small of a pan. While the veggies cooked down enough to fit, the process of cooking them ended up being a little more difficult than it should have been. Pro: it worked out okay; Con: it was not as simple as it should have been. I had to keep tossing the veg around to keep from burning anything.
Success #2: deglazing the pan with cognac then adding a tablespoon of butter and some more of that lamb fat created a nice, thick little sauce of sorts to cook the radicchio, and bell pepper in. It was my first time cooking radicchio, and, from what I read online, it can be bitter. It was decidedly not bitter; it was fucking delicious.
Mistake #3: I had a presentation plan: offset stacks of each item, the two veggies parts in adjacent corners and the meat in the center of the opposite side. Nice little geometry, I thought. I put the first bit of veg down, then decided I didn't like that idea, so I put the lamb up against it, then realized it looked terrible due to the lack of proper searing, so I put the mushroom/radicchio mix on top of it. I realized that looked terrible, too, so I knocked the veggies off the top of the lamb. I realized that looked terrible, but, at that point, I was hungry as hell, so I just said "fuck it" and got to eating.
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| I didn't have any other pictures, so here's Princess Nadia |
Success #3: it may have looked like total ass, but my first two priorities with food are flavor and aroma, respectively. It smelled pretty damn good, like a B+, but that flavor was a solid A.
Lessons learned: be careful cutting before cooking, use the right sized pan, and make sure I can execute a planned presentation properly. Also, not a new lesson to learn, but fat is the bestest.
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