Easter dinner

Very simple, very nice. My brother was visiting and he likes to celebrate Easter (so do I, really). I got a butterflied leg of lamb from Whole Foods (actually two, since they seemed to be half legs) and used the "Basque" marinade from the Jamisons' Big Book of Outdoor Cooking. This was just 1/2 c. olive oil, 1/4 c. sherry vinegar, 1/4 c. minced fresh tarragon, 6 cloves garlic minced, 1 Tbl coarse salt. Mix and pour in Ziploc bag with 4-1/2 to 5 lbs lamb, pounded to uniform thickness, 1-1/2 to 2 in. for overnight marinade.

Pull out and drain the lamb an hour before grilling. Jamison talks about 2-heat grilling but I just fired up the Big Green Egg for direct heat and grilled for about 20 min. turning 3 or 4 times, and let it rest 10 min before slicing. Really good -- A. even said it might be the best lamb I've done.

We accompanied with a Fingerling potato salad that we had tasted the previous weekend at La Cuisine in Alexandria during a tasting of French olive oils. This one demonstrated the virtues of Picholine oil. It has 1-1/2 lbs potatoes, boiled till tender, 4 hardboiled eggs, mustard, garlic, 1/4 c. white wine vinegar, 1/2 c. Picholine oil (so fruity and peppery), blanched green beans, salt and pepper. You add a little water to the vinaigrette (and we left out the 2 anchovy fillets). This is a real keeper, and I think the oil does make a big difference.

Cote du Rhone was the wine, brown sugar shortcakes with a strawberry-rhubarb compote and whipped cream the dessert. Happy Easter indeed.

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!

Pulses

The past weekend was a healthy one for eating with two homemade pulse dishes. Pulses are largely synonymous with beans, though referring to dry beans that are cooked as such.

In any case, we had a flageolet and lamb stew from Steve Sando's Heirloom Beans. You soak a pound of beans overnight, then brown lamb shoulder steaks (I used a scant 3 lbs bone-in, though the recipe says 2 lbs), sautee a mirepoix, add the beans and the soaking water, add back the steaks and cook for a couple of hours, until the beans are tender and the meat is falling off the bone. Remove the lamb from the stew and cut meat into bite-sized pieces (discard bones and excess fat) and put the meat back in the pot. To thicken the stew, you can take a cup of beans and broth and puree them and add back to the stew. Serve with a cilantro gremolata of chopped cilantro, garlic and lemon zest. It's a lovely way to transition from winter to spring.

On Sunday, we had a simple dish from Sara Jenkins' Olives and Oranges. You soak chickpeas overnight with a couple cloves unpeeled garlic and a sprig of rosemary, then cook for a couple of hours until tender. Separately you sautee two cloves of minced garlic in olive oil for 1 min., then add 1/4 c. water and simmer for 4 min. (Jenkins says this takes some of the bite out of the garlic), then add a 2 lb. cabbage cut into narrow strips, with 1 c. of water and cook until tender. Then add in cooked chickpeas and blend flavors. This truly does bring out the nice vegetable flavor of the cabbage and chickpeas cooked from scratch are always good. But the broth is thin and this may be too bland for some people. Jenkins does say to doctor it up at will, with harissa or Parmesan, whatever.

Bean dishes always leave me with a nice balanced feeling, never too full. Always ready to try a new recipe for beans.

La vie en rose

We had the great good fortune earlier this month to spend a few days visiting some American friends at their fabulous house in southern France, near Uzes, a market town in Languedoc.

We timed our arrival for a Friday so that we could go to the Uzes market on Saturday, and it was worth the effort. Uzes is a well-preserved medieval city and the market fills the winding streets of the historic center.

I lived in France for 11 years and always loved the markets. I lived near Nation in Paris and generally went to the Saturday morning market in the Cours de Vincennes or the quirkier Marche d'Aligre (which was written up in the recent Gourmet issue on Paris as part of their discovery of the eastern part of the city).

Probably the most spectacular market I visited was the one in Perigeux, in the heart of truffle and foie gras country.

The Uzes market was also terrific, though. There were at least a dozen cheese vendors and we bought several nice goat cheeses. We guessed wrong on a baker who sold us some croissants that were not great. The most exotic stands were those with huge porcelain bowls of olives and tapenade and spices.

My goal at the market was to get a real gigot d'agneau to fix for our hosts. We found a butcher stand where he cut the gigot from the back half of a lamb, trimmed and wrapped it up for us.

I also wanted to find cocos blancs, which I had read about in a cookbook. These are fresh white beans in season in early summer, so they were available in great abundance. So we had our meal with the roast gigot -- you only have to insert slivers of garlic into it and pop it in the oven -- and the beans, which I shelled and cooked only about 10 minutes. We dressed them with oil and gremolata and served them at room temperature with the medium-rare lamb. Delicious.

We continued to live off the fat of the land, so to speak. On Monday, we found a store open to buy echine de porc, the chops cut from the loin rather than the rib, which have much more marbling and are great for grilling. A neighbor in the little village brought by some eggplant and squash from the community garden, so we grilled everything for dinner, getting a nice char on the vegetables and drizzling with balsamic vinegar.

It was part of a wonderful time that started with a welcome dinner from our hosts of grilled salmon paired with a fragrant ratatouille that was great the first night and even better when we had it again with the lamb. We consumed gallons of rose wine from the local vineyard, an organic producer who sold wine in bottles and in boxes. So we had a great time.