Spring

It's nice when thing things start to come together, as with a spring menu we prepared for guests over the weekend. Even though it turned out to be unseasonably cold, it was fun to anticipate the warmer weather with the food we associate with spring.

At the last visit from the New Morning farmer's market earlier this month, I got a leg of lamb from the Blue Rooster Farm, a family-owned Pennsylvania farm that raises its own sheep, beef and pork. The website describes how their Border Collie, Mac, herds the sheep. Like all meat sold at farmer's markets, it was frozen, so I was able to keep it in the freezer for this dinner. We had already used some lamb shoulder from Blue Rooster in another recipe and knew the lamb would be tasty. While it's almost impossible to improve on a leg of lamb roasted with garlic slivers, I wanted to try a recipe from Paula Wolfert's The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen for a slow-roasted leg of lamb with pomegranate glaze and do the roasting in the Big Green Egg.

Our half-leg was smaller than what the recipe called for but it was plenty for four people. The pomegranate glaze was a simple whisking together of pomegranate molasses with water, onion, and garlic. You coat the lamb in the glaze and then let it sit at room temperature for a couple of hours. You heat the oven, or in this case the Egg, to 450 degrees, put the lamb on the rack and reduce the temperature to 250 degrees. I'm still learning the ropes on temperature control with the Egg, so I had trouble getting the temperature down quickly, and only got it to 300. So I checked the internal temperature early and when it reached the 130 degrees called for, pulled it off and let it rest in a warm oven. The other concession to outdoor cooking was to baste it with the glaze instead of the pan drippings as Wolfert calls for, since pan drippings didn't survive even with the foil pan underneath the lamb.

Once the lamb was off the grill, I switched to direct heat and grilled the asparagus. Ideally, we would have shopped for vegetables at a farmer's market, but it was probably too early for local asparagus anyway and we got this Victoria Island product at Whole Foods. Ditto for the baby spinach that we prepared with bacon and goat cheese in an Epicurious recipe that used some of the bacon grease to dress and wilt the spinach.

I cooked the luscious runner cannellini beans from Rancho Gordo with garlic, olive oil and chopped fresh sage, then dressed them still warm in more olive oil. For dessert, we had Andrea's delicious cornmeal pound cake with strawberries macerated in lavender sugar. A young but classy Bordeaux was an excellent accompaniment to everything.

Everything came out well. The lamb was still nice and pink, not dried out, and had a wonderful flavor. Everything else tasted fresh and Mediterranean. Now all we need is warm weather!