Mediterranean Feast - Lamb and Couscous

Yes I know I have a lamb addiction but I can't help it. It's just that good. And with any new thing I come across I have to share it with Dad. So he and I did guy night again, but this time with a Mediterranean theme. Grilled French Cut Lamb Chops on top of a bed of Couscous. I cannot come close to expressing in words how good this stuff is but hopefully my words and a few pics will help convey the message...

To start I picked up two packages of French Cut Rib Racks from the local Sam's:

Each package contains two half racks:

I was looking at the skin along the meaty side of the racks and thought it looked like silver skin from a loin which is very tough. I decided to remove it from one of them to see if it made a difference:

Don't worry about this. It made no difference at all. Skip this part.

I did two different marinades - red wine/honey mustard/fresh rosemary and basil pesto/garlic - as I have done before to see which one Dad liked better. The ingredients for both marinades are below:

For the red wine/rosemary marinade I combined:

1 half cup of honey mustard
1 quarter cup of red wine
2 teaspoons of rough chopped fresh rosemary (You can use dried rosemary but use less as dried herbs are more potent than fresh herbs)
1 tablespoon of minced garlic
3 turns of a pepper grinder

If marinating more or less lamb just keep the mustard to wine ratio at 2:1. You can add more or less rosemary or garlic as you feel appropriate according to your taste.

Since I let my rosemary bush die (sad) I had to buy some from the store. I'm not someone who stresses about organic products but it was all they had that was fresh. As you can see below the rosemary was quite woody so the stem could not be used for this:

Peal the leaves off:

After a quick rough chop the rosemary is ready for the marinade:

Now combine the rosemary with the mustard/red wine/garlic concoction and whisk or fork to mix well. I realize the color and consistency of this is not the most appetizing, but have a little faith and you will be blown away:

The other marinade was simply enough of the pre-made pesto to coat each side of each half rack and a teaspoon of garlic per side per rack as well. I ran out of gallon ziplocks so I had to marinade those two separately. Place the lamb in the bag, spoon in the garlic and pesto to each side, close ziplock and smoosh (yes, that's a technical term) the pesto around to get complete coverage. The mustard marinade is much less dense and will coat much easier:

Put these in the fridge for a few hours up to 24 hours. These were done overnight.

The next day I pulled the lamb from the fridge and let them come up to temp in the kitchen while I prepped the grill and lit the charcoal:

While the charcoal was lighting Dad and I were partaking in a little vino. Rombauer merlot for during the meal as lamb is not a very overpowering meat and neither is merlot in terms of wine so they pair nicely together. We got into the Water Wheel Shiraz after dinner during the Dark Knight but did not finish it. That stuff is stellar but maybe a little too bold for Lamb. Oh, and both bottles were provided by Pappy:

Again, two zone cooking, coals on the left nothing on the right. Normally when I do lamb I put the fat part of the lamb rack over the heat with the skinnier part (closer to the bones) towards the edge so that the skinny part does not overcook. Well, as you can see below I did not have enough room on my Weber for that so the thickest one went right over the coals with the other three conforming to my usual method:

As you can see below the one right over the heat cooked the fastest and was flipped first:

In order to keep the heat away from the thinner part of the rack I propped the meat up against the other rack with the mustard/red wine marinade:

All I'm looking for is a nice char to the lamb. The lamb will not be finished over the high heat. I want to caramelize and char those amazing marinades onto the outside of the meat.

The two marinades provide two little snags when cooking due to their nature. The honey mustard marinade has a lot of sugar in it so it will blacken more quickly than the pesto marinade. A little blackening is OK. Just be mindful not to let it burn.

The pesto marinade represents its own problem. It has a lot of oil in it and can easily cause flare ups in the charcoal so you need to keep an eye on it and rearrange accordingly so that the pesto marinated lamb does not burn.

Once all 4 racks have a nice char Ipulled them from the heat and put them on the side with no coals. If one half rack is nicely charred, then pull it to the side while the rest get to that point. This does not have to happen all at once.

Make sure to put your largest racks to the outside, closest to the heat, and close the lid:

They baked about 250-275 for about 15 minutes. Since they were touching they insulated each other. If I were doing just two half racks and had room for them to be apart I probably would've only needed about 10 minutes.

In the mean time, time to make the couscous. First off, couscous is a grain. Do not look for it in the pasta aisle as I did. It's with the rice. Pine nuts are in the baking aisle with the other nuts.

Ingredients:

1 ten ounce box of regular couscous
1 three ounce package of pine nuts (could use two of these if you really like pine nuts)
1 32 ounce container of chicken stock
1 tablespoon of minced garlic
Couple turns of black pepper

Put a little olive oil in a pot over medium heat. Put in the pine nuts:

As the nuts start to brown add the garlic, shaking the pot periodically to rotate the nuts so they don't burn:

Once 1/2 to 3/4 of the pine nuts are browned add the chicken stock. If you wait any longer you risk burning some of them. Bring to a boil:

Once it comes to a boil, stir in the couscous:

Remove from heat and cover. Every couple of minutes stir up the mixture. In around 5 minutes the stock will be completely absorbed. Remove the lid, stir up again a couple of times to fluff and it is ready to serve. At this point I put the lid back on to keep warm until my lamb was ready.

And here is that lamb inside resting for about 5 minutes:

Here we have it plated on a large scoop of couscous:

Dad preferred the pesto marinade just slightly over the honey mustard. I'm the opposite. Wanna know how much he liked it? He cooked it for mom about 3 days later. This stuff is a sure fire home run.

I realize that french cut lamb rib racks are not cheap. These ran about $10 per half rack. But if you have a special occasion and want something that is low risk with very high reward I highly recommend this...

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I want to come clean. I think I have a problem...

OK, so I have come to grips with this. They say admitting you have a problem is the hardest part. I tried to hide it from my family and friends, but I don't think I can keep living a lie. I have a problem. I am woefully and hopelessly addicted. There is nothing I can do. I'm ready to come clean.

I have a lamb problem....

I will be doing lamb again tonight. Not the french cut rib racks this time. This time I'm doing some nice meaty lamb chops. I got a great package of eight fat lamb chops that I split into two sets of four. One set I will do tonight, the other I put in the freezer. I applied the same marinade to both.

First let's get a look at these bad boys. As usual the celly is there for reference:




I used the same pesto I used the last time I did the rib racks but with a little twist this time:


And that twist is rosemary:


Rosemary is the perfect herb for lamb. It's like Pastrami and Rye. Peanut Butter and Jelly. Prime Rib and Horsey Sauce, Bacon and Eggs. The flavors just go so well together.

A little about rosemary. I grow a rosemary plant year round. Outside in the warm months, inside in front of a window in the cold months. Rosemary is extremely drought tolerant and likes rocky soil so no fertilizer is recommended. What does all that mean? It means if you water this thing, maybe once a month you can have fresh rosemary all year long.

One thing with rosemary grown at home as opposed to what you buy at the store is that you may get some woody branches. The stuff in the store is all new growth and can just be rough chopped stems and all. You have to be a little more careful with the stuff you grow at home. Here is a sprig of new growth:


And here is a sprig of woody growth:


Peal the leaves off both and here is that the stems look like:


The top one will be noticeably hard even after cooking it if it were diced up and added to the marinade. The bottom one would be fine if it were chopped and added to a marinade and cooked.

So I stripped the leaves off the woody branches and had a nice pile of rosemary:


And a few seconds with a Santoku and my rosemary is now just beyond a rough chop and ready for the marinade:


I basically split the chopped rosemary into four amounts. Two amounts were larger than the other two. The two larger amounts went into the bag with the chops I will grill the next day. And the other two amounts go into the bag going into the freezer. Why two amounts each? One for each side of the chops in the bag. Why two different size amounts? The ones going into the freezer will incur more rosemary flavor due to a longer time in the marinade than the ones being cooked 24 hours later.

Here we have the two bags. One destined for my grill in 24 hours or so and one heading to the bitter chill of my freezer:


And since I have not actually grilled them yet, you will have to wait till tomorrow for the rest of the write up.

I will say this though, I will be trying to use my newest grill gadget tonight, just not sure if it will work on lamb chops. It really needs a larger cut of meat but I will try anyway. A little tease as to what it is. My wife heard about it and said, "that is the most obnoxious, useless and ridiculous thing I have ever heard of. My husband will love it!!!"

1/2/2009 - Sorry I have neglected this post for so long. One word - Holidays.

I teased my latest grill gadget in the first half of the post. It's not going to be as exciting as I previously thought. It will be really cool in the future, it just didn't work all that well with the lamb chops. That grill gadget is this:


What is that? It's a branding iron with my initials:


Yes, the GrillinFool's initials are SGT. Seems more like a rank than initials, but they're the only ones I've got. Two problems with the branding iron. First, the chops just aren't big enough for me to get the initials branded well. The chops are basically mini porterhouse steaks which have the bone running down the middle which made it hard to find enough meat to get a good brand. Here is about the best I got and I tried it on two different chops:


Second, having never used a branding iron before I had no idea how long it took for the iron to get hot, so by the time it was hot I had over cooked my lamb just a bit. The lamb was medium rather than rare to medium rare. It was still really good, just a little overdone for my taste.

Well, back to the process. After 24 hours in the marinade I pulled the chops and put them on a plate to let them come up to room temp:


And the the beverage to accompany this meal is not wine but Sam Dark:


I love this beer. Not extremely thick and dark like a Guiness or Murpheys stouts but still packed with a lot of great flavor.

Evidently when I used this pesto with the rib rack I removed a lot of it before putting it on the grill. For these I just threw some coarse salt on each side and threw them on the heat. See, that pesto is really flamable. I wasn't looking for a really intense sear like I do with steaks for a couple of reasons. One, the chops may be big in terms of lamb chops but much smaller than a steak and searing them that much would make it hard to keep them medium rare. Second, branding my initials won't look as cool if the chops had a dark crust. So here they are searing:


And here we have them resting. If you look close you can see a couple attempts at branding the chops here:


And here we have the money shot. Like I said not as rare as I normally cook them but they were still really juicy and delicious:


Things I would do to improve these lamb chops:

1. Remove a lot of the marinade before throwing them on the grill.
2. Not try to use the branding iron on such small cuts but you know how it is when you get a new toy!! Gotta play with it right away.
   

One more thing about lamb as I think I will put lamb to rest for a while, at least on this site. Of course I will continue to grill it but I think I have gone a little overboard here for a while. Between lamb chops and the rib racks...Rib racks win hands down. The meat is more flavorful and, this may seem to be a non issue to some, but to get all the meat off the chops requires a lot of work. The meat that is up against the middle bone at the top of the chop (where the bone forms a T) can really only be removed with your fingers if you want to get all of it. In the end it is a huge mess. Sure, I used my fingers when eating the rib racks, but I never touched the meat, just that beautifully designed bone handle!!

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French Cut Lamb Chops!!

One of my favorite meats, and maybe my fave, is lamb, particularly French Cut Lamb Chops. Something about the succulent meat with the little bone handle that I just love. Maybe I love it because I don't get it nearly as often as I get steak or ribs, but this is one of my favorite things to cook.

I bought a double pack of racks from Sam's and decided to do them with two different marinades:


The first was inspired by an appetizer at a family party on the day after thanksgiving. There was a bowl of basil pesto next to a bowl of crusty bread. I enjoyed the pesto so much I used it. I was contemplating using this after a suggestion from scottq16 (actual name unknown) but after eating some of the bread in the Pesto I was sold. I didn't have any fresh basil so I used dried basil, marjoram, thyme, oregano, and some fresh rosemary in olive oil. Of course I added some minced garlic and white pepper (I'm out of black pepper corns):


Here we have the pesto whisked up:


For the other marinade I went even easier. Honey mustard, fresh rosemary, garlic, white pepper, and a little red wine:


Quick note on the red wine I use in my marinades. First rule about wine in cooking - if you won't drink it, don't cook with it. Cooking sherry or cooking wine on the shelf at the grocery store should never be used in cooking. Red truck is by no means the greatest wine out there, but is nice $10 wine. And in this case it may not even be red truck in the bottle. Whenever I don't finish a bottle of red, if there isn't enough left to put the vacuum pump on to to pull the air out and save for a couple of weeks in the fridge, I pour it into this bottle in the fridge specifically for marinading...

Back to the marinade. The marinade itself does not look all that appetizing in the picture but trust me it was money:


I threw each rack into a ziplock with one of the two marinades and into the fridge for close to 24 hours:


The next day I pulled the racks out of the bags. For the mustard marinade I used the bag to pull some of it off so that when I added salt right before cooking it would actually contact the meat. I didn't want to rinse off the marinade but I didn't want it on as thick as it was. The Pesto marinade was oil based so I didn't have the same issue with that rack.


When I pulled the rack out that was in the pesto marinade it smelled so good I could've eaten it raw!?!?! It was incredible. I can almost smell it right now it was that memorable!?!

I sprinkled some coarse salt on both sides before putting on the grill as usual.

For the cooking method I did my standard two zone cooking. Hot coals on one side, no coals on the other side. I grilled them over high heat (no flame job this time like I do with steaks). Here we have them meat side down to start. One was thicker than the other so I put that on a little before the other one but here they are together on the grill:


Then I flipped them and put them bone side down once they got a decent sear:


The one on the bottom left is the mustard marinade. It is going to char more than the other due to the honey in the mustard. Don't let that scare you.

If you notice I kept the bones away from the heat and the thicker meaty section over the hottest part of the fire. I didn't want to overcook the skinnier section of meat higher up the rack.

Once they seared well on each side I pulled them to the side with no heat. They were still incredibly rare at this point. I locked down the grill and left them to bake for 5 minutes:


After 5 minutes they were still incredibly rare so I left them on for another 5 minutes. Had this been a warm summer evening and not a chilly windy evening in late November I would guess that 6-7 minutes would be all that was necessary. In this case they baked for just over 10 minutes before I pulled them off the grill to rest:


I let them rest for about 4 minutes. I basically treated them like a steak. The thickest part was more than an inch thick and with a steak that thick I would've rested it about that long as well. Here they are plated, 4 chops from each type:


A couple of notes. First, I tried to accommodate for one of the racks being thinner than the other, but the thinner cooked a little faster than I had planned as you can see with the chops on the right not being as red. That being said both were very tender and juicy. I guess that is part of the allure of the lamb.

Second, despite letting them rest the juice of the lamb leaked all over the place. I mean everywhere yet the meat was still very juicy on the last bone as it was on the first. And as you can see I ate every last bone. Notice the juice all over the cutting board, even filling part of the groove that encircles the board:


And finally, I will say that after a very extensive taste test between the two that I enjoyed immensely the mustard marinade was the better marinade but just slightly so. Something about the sweetness of the rosemary and the subtle sweetness of the honey mustard made the lamb just incredible. I may be doing this again next weekend!?!?!
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