Tag: rosemary

After seeing this completely and totally awesome page for minestrone linked off of wikipedia, I felt it was my patriotic duty to make minestrone. After all, I do live in Las Vegas, and anybody who lives here knows that italian restaurants outnumber any other kind of restaurant by a factor of approximately thirty-seven to three. I especially liked the basic assumption- that you can pretty much just buy seasonal vegetables, completely at random, throw them all together, and make some soup. I mean, you basically don't need to know how to do anything. How could this possibly go wrong?

So I went to Sunflower Market, since they sell local produce, and bought twelve of every vegetable they had. If you could screw up minestrone, I was going to figure out how. I came home, got a big stock pot out, and started my soffrito- a fancy word to say I rendered the fat out of some bacon and then threw in some onions, leeks, and shallots.

I also didn't have pig trotters or marrow bones or anything like that, so for thickening I waited until my 'soffrito' was pretty much sweated, then threw in some flour, like a roux. Then I spent TWO. HOURS. cutting up vegetables and throwing them in. I cubed the turnips. I chopped up the zucchini, summer squash, celery root, spinach leaves, potatoes, and carrots. It looked like I was carving up the grisly aftermath of a war against the vegetables, a war which I handily won. All of it drowning in six cans of chicken broth and a pitcher of water, with a sprig of rosemary (I fished that out after everything started smelling like rosemary), a bay leaf, and a parmesan crust. Then, because I was pretty much throwing in everything I had, I put in two cans of kidney beans and a cup of orzo. By this point I was in such a rut that I might have diced my children and thrown them in, had they wandered into the kitchen.

It cooked for HOURS. Three and a half hours. I felt like a witch, sitting there and stirring my massive cauldron of stuff. And then something magical happened. It started to smell like delicious.

So, basically, you'd have to try way harder than I did to screw up minestrone.

I obviously don't want to take up much kitchen space at EU Zero, so I prepared the lamb smear (which the lamb will be dipped in before the panko roll) here at home.

So far, the ingredients look something like this:

• 3 Tbl Olive Oil (oregano flavored)
• 3 Tbl Tahini
• 1/2 container spreadable goat cheese
• 1 tsp fresh thyme
• 1 stripped twig rosemary
• Onion powder (to replace 1/4 onion)
• Garlic powder
• Black pepper
• Paprika (just a dash)
• Soy sauce (just a dash)
• 1 tsp fresh dill
• Lemon juice

So far, it tastes rather strongly of tahini... but a lot of the flavors that come after come in notes. The goal, of course, is to augment lamb and maybe obscure the slight mutton taste, not to become the flavor of the dish. So the lamb won't be very thickly covered.

The thin coating is the reason I decided to experiment so much with this dish. I haven't seen any recipes online that suggest coating lamb with either tahini or goat cheese, so I may be well on my way to a tremendous flop.

Stay tuned.

We have this big bag of chicken breasts in the freezer. Not the good, boneless, dinner-in-ten-minutes kind, but the genetically enhanced, buffalo-breast, bone-in stewing kind. Tonight, I figured I'd try the bake-and-broil method to cook it.

I started by sweating some onions and garlic over medium-low heat, then increasing the heat to medium and dumping in:

1. A glazing liquid. (I used half soy sauce and half molasses; you could use honey, or heck, even mango syrup). About 1/2 cup.

2. One green herb. I used a little mexican oregano; thyme and/or rosemary might have been better, but I didn't have any.

3. One egg yolk. Just to make it more glaze-y.

4. Some small additions. For me- pepper, a spritz of lime juice, one crushed dried red pepper, and a little salt (not much- soy sauce, remember?)

After all this, I had a thick brown liquid that smelled like pureed awesome. I folded a long piece of aluminum foil into thirds, dumped in one breast, made a pouch, and slathered it with sauce. (Two breasts total, so I split it among both).

Next, the bake-then-broil. While the pouches of aluminum foil are closed, bake on 350 degrees for about half an hour- then, open the tops and broil on full blast for three-five minutes until the onions start to caramelize.

It was wonderful. The foil kept the chicken from drying out, and the glaze, once broiled in, was enough to make this dish a repeat customer.