Capital Spice

<<EDIT 2/13/12 11:30 AM – Voting is now live for the DC Lamb Pro-Am.  Check out all of the entries here (DO NOT do this on an empty stomach) and then vote for your favorite.  Or for us, if we’re not your favorite.  Either way, thanks for your support!>>

Foodie pop quiz.  What’s the first word that comes to mind when I say “lamb?”  If you’re a Fan of Lamb, the answer is likely to be something like “tender,” “medium-rare” or just plain “delicious.”

If you had asked us just a few years ago, our answer would probably have been “intimidating.”  Restaurant presentations of lamb tend toward the more impressive: racks and chops, slices from the leg and loin, often served with rich sauces.  That frame of reference, coupled with the price tag, was enough to make us hesitant to try it at home.

As is often the case, Trader Joe’s provided us with the impetus to give it a go.  We bought a frozen, seasoned leg section for a dinner party and roasted it.  Served with a simple wine reduction, it was a revelation of bold, meaty flavor without the chew of similarly intense cuts of beef.  We’ve been Fans of Lamb ever since.

When the American Lamb Board invited us to compete with twelve other local bloggers for a chance to cook at their Lamb Pro-Am in March, we jumped at the chance.  We were told we’d be cooking a boneless leg of lamb, supplied by local rancher Craig Rogers of Border Springs Farm – even better!  But we couldn’t just do a traditional leg presentation.  We needed to get creative.

…And that’s where we ran into problems.

Our first inclination, as you can probably guess if you’re a regular reader, was to smoke the lamb on our Big Green Egg.  The low temperatures are great for coaxing out maximal flavor while maintaining a tender bite.  There’s just one problem: the smoke is lost on the lamb.  Even after hours in a BGE with aggressive woods like hickory and mesquite, lamb pretty much just tastes like lamb (not that that’s a BAD thing).

…So our first trick was a no-go.

Then we thought back to our short-lived run as a Charcutepalooza participant.  In working our way through Michael Ruhlman’s “Charcuterie” cookbook, we were intrigued by a recipe for merguez, a spicy lamb sausage.  Why not use some of the lamb to make sausage as part of our dish?

We decided to incorporate homemade merguez into a lamb chili that has become a family favorite.  The dish calls for chorizo, but we tweaked the spice profile to complement the flavors of the substitute sausage.  The addition of roasted red peppers and black beans (chili sacrilege, we know), completed the transformation.

…Remember those problems we mentioned?

As it turns out, we probably shouldn’t have used this contest as our first attempt at sausage-making.  Pork back fat, which Ruhlman calls for in his merguez recipe, is not the same as pork fatback, which we found packaged and sold salted and skin-on in the grocery store.  Needless to say, this was not an ingredient that fed easily (or at all) through our KitchenAid’s sausage-making attachment.  Our dreams of “Chili with Lamb Two Ways” were ground up while the sausage components remained untouched.

Thankfully, we had already planned to incorporate the spices from the merguez into our chili, so we were able to pick out the pork fat and use the cut-up lamb – we couldn’t stand the thought of letting it go to waste!  We made an emergency grocery run for Mexican-style chorizo from local producer Logan’s Sausages and got to work on a re-revised version of our chili.

This is where we make you drool with a description of the lamb.  The leg we received from Border Springs was beautiful – lots of deep purple-red muscle with some creamy white fat around the exterior.  We’ve worked with our share of inferior lamb in the past, fighting our way past large pockets of hard, nasty fat and silverskin.  In this case, we had to do almost no work to get it ready for cooking.

We began by rendering some of the fat from the chorizo and then cooking onions, garlic, cumin, smoked paprika, oregano and red pepper flakes in that oil to get the ball rolling.  To that delicious combination we added the chorizo and a chili paste made from chicken stock and chipotle peppers in adobo.  We turned the heat up to high and added the black beans (which we had soaked overnight) and the cubed lamb.

At this point we turned down the heat and let the whole mixture simmer for an hour.  The beans softened up nicely and the lamb took on that firm tender feeling that we always love.  We rinsed golden hominy and added it to the pot with some more roasted red peppers, and we let things cook for 15 more minutes.  That’s when we turned the heat off altogether and let the chili rest for about 5 minutes (we couldn’t stand to wait any longer).

The chili was wonderful all by itself – the lamb picked up the cumin and the paprika while still retaining its own assertive flavor.  Taken together, this gave what could have been a one-note dish a complex, Middle Eastern accent.  But this is a contest, so we wanted to make sure we made it more camera-ready.  We garnished the dish with shredded cheese, sour cream and cilantro.  It may not have been the duo of lamb we originally envisioned, but the final result was a testament to the quality and versatility of the lamb.

Capital Spicy Lamb Chili

1 lb merguez sausage (or Mexican chorizo in a pinch) removed from casings, if any
1 red onion, diced
10 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
5 chipotle chiles in adobo (roughly 1 small can)
2 cups chicken stock
1 pound dried black beans, soaked overnight and drained
4 pounds lamb (preferably leg or shoulder), cut into 1” cubes
2 cans hominy (golden or white), rinsed
1 red pepper, roasted and peeled

Garnishes to taste: sour cream, shredded cheese, diced raw onion, cilantro

1. In a small saucepan, cook chipotle chiles in chicken stock for 5 minutes.  Remove from heat and allow to cool, then pulse mixture in a blender until thoroughly combined.
2. Sautee the sausage in a large heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat for 10 minutes or until it gives up a slick of oil
3. Remove sausage from pot and set aside.  Add onions, garlic, cumin, paprika and red pepper flakes and cook for 5 minutes or until onions soften.
4. Return chorizo to pot and add chipotle-chicken stock paste.  Cook for 5 minutes.
5. Add cubed lamb and black beans.  Bring mixture to a boil and then reduce heat to a simmer.
6. Simmer covered for one hour.
7. Taste beans and lamb.  If cooked to taste, add hominy and diced roasted red pepper.  Simmer uncovered for an additional 15 minutes.
8. Remove from heat and allow to rest for five minutes.
9. Serve with garnish of your choice.

As we mentioned at the top, this post is our entry into the Lamb Pro-Am bloggers’ challenge.  When voting opens up, we’ll be sure to provide you with a link.  Take a look at all of the competitors, and then we’d love it if you could help us make it into the finals by voting for your favorite!

When I got back to my office with the beef for this month’s Charcutepalooza challenge, several of my coworkers lit up with big smiles.  You see, I work with a decent number of Texans, and brisket is the meat of choice in traditional Texas barbecue.  They envisioned a succulent, peppery masterpiece bathed in post oak smoke overnight.  You can imagine the way their faces fell when they learned that the brisket would be bathed in salty, seasoned water instead.

“You’re going to do what with a perfectly good brisket?” was the question.

I could have seen it coming.  I should have seen it coming.  Of course March’s challenge would be corned beef…St. Patrick’s Day is one of the few holidays that is actively associated with a specific dish and it just so happens to be cured meat.

There’s just one problem.  We’re not exactly fans of boiled dinners, stews or braises that involve cooking meat until it loses all trace of its muscular past here at Capital Spice.  Add steamed cabbage and overcooked potatoes and you’ve lost us completely.  So what’s an aspiring charcutiere to do?

I could have fallen back on the Apprentice Challenge, brining a chicken or some pork chops, but it would have felt like a cop-out.  We’ve been singing the praises of brining for years now, and we know from experience the transformative effect it can have on roasted chicken.  We’ve even brined a turkey for our Fakesgiving dinner.

I knew I had to go for the Charcutiere Challenge this time around.  I wanted to anyway, as I’m eager to embrace Charcutepalooza as fully as possible and I’d like to think I’m ready for the varsity team when it comes to curing.  That’s why Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s introductory post was such a lifesaver.

In her description of her get-together with friends, she describes what might be one of the best party games ever: a head-to-head competition between a classic Reuben sandwich and a Baltimore special known as the Cloak and Dagger.  That’s when it clicked for me: I didn’t have to serve my corned beef hot as part of an Irish meal, I could slice it thinly and serve it deli-style.  I could even use the opportunity to introduce our friends to a largely unknown New Jersey treat.

Go ahead and make your jokes about what that might be, then rejoin the group for the process and the results after the jump. (more…)

Some things are just meant to be.  The stars line up, you find yourself in the right place at the right time, and you’re handed something you didn’t even know you were looking for.  It can be a job opportunity, or a romantic connection, or something even deeper than those.

For us, it was bacon.

On January 26th, Mike read Bonnie Benwick’s profile of Mrs. Wheelbarrow and the Yummy Mummy’s tandem charcuterial endeavor and everything just fell into place.  We were just gearing up to start another one of our Cookbook Challenges – an attempt to winnow our ever-growing collection of cookbooks by attempting a new recipe from each one to make sure we still found the books helpful.  In fact, one of the first books Elizabeth reached for was Mike’s copy of Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s “Charcuterie: the Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing.”  Although he had received it a little over a year earlier, he had yet to attempt any feats of cured meat.

Enter “Charcutepalooza.”  The article made it sound tasty and fun all at the same time, and anyone who has read at least a few of our posts knows our love of all things brined, cured or smoked.  So we reached out to Mrs. Wheelbarrow through her website and decided to throw ourselves into the challenge along with the hundreds of other bloggers who have signed on.  A contest with some killer prizes has no doubt piqued the interest of some, but most seem genuinely motivated by the spirit that inspired the ladies to begin with.

The process seemed easy enough.  Each month a new pair of challenges is announced, with one for novices and one for those seeking a more intense assignment.  We all agree to work on the challenges ourselves and blog about our results on the 15th of each month.  We’ll continue like this throughout 2011, having cooked our way through a dozen recipes (more if you try both challenges in any given month) by the time we’re through.

So why am I up at 11:30 on a Monday night (Valentine’s Day, no less) waiting for my homemade bacon to reach an internal 150 degrees Fahrenheit?  My delicious, unintentional procrastination after the jump. (more…)

Posting this just in time to, well, either make you feel smug or feel annoyed that you only got a regular ole frozen organic turkey.

Amalah shares her experience buying her turkey directly from the farm in MD.

And by direct from the farm, I mean pointing at a currently living turkey in a very Julius Caesar bring-me-the-head-of-that-one-it-displeases-me kind of way and having it sent to The Barn.

Doesn’t get fresher than that! Gobble gobble!

amalah . com: Turkey Run.

Interesting primer on the benefits of hunted and farmed game meat.  A co-worker of mine is married to a hunter and he actually hunts bear (!!). But this isn’t about a fancy rug for the cabin: he brings the meat home and she freezes it to feed the family in the winter. Apparently her bear lasagna is pretty tasty!

Trying out game meat.

Here at Capital Spice HQ, we like to wade knee-deep in the season’s bounty and use it to guide or recipes.  Mint growing out of control? Oh tragedy, looks like mojitos are on deck. Have a case of the basil overload? Sounds like the perfect excuse to go crazy with caprese and pesto. And I don’t need any recipe to tell me how to eat cherries, which are perfect just the way nature delivers them.

When Mike’s parents drove down from New Jersey this week, we knew we had another summer harvest in spades: fresh blueberries. Much like pinkie rings and fist-pumping, you just don’t F around with New Jersey when it comes to blueberries. Once these little antioxidant bombs come into season, those in the know hightail it to pick-your-own farms where thimble-sized berries can be had for a song. We knew immediately that a bounty of Jersey blueberries were headed for our front door. But what to do with the plethora?

Blueberry soup is perhaps not the first thing I’d think of when considering a blueberry-based recipe. I don’t know that it would even make the top ten (although 6 out of those ten would probably be variations on some kind of cocktail, so that list is pretty skewed). Mike and I came across the recipe when thumbing through From the Earth to the Table, one of our never-fail cookbooks.  It looked healthy and easy – critical criteria for us these days. We were intrigued.

Commonly found in the cuisine of those strapping Scandinavians (or, Scandi Candy), fruit-based soups provide a light meal in the dead heat of summer. The trick to preparing them is balance. In many cases, the natural sugars from the fruit – especially if the fruit is cooked – can deliver an over the top sweetness more appropriate to dessert. With this soup, the blueberries require some additional sweetness to overcome their natural tart flavors.  Chef Ash brings natural sugars with honey to sweeten the berries but keeps the flavors complex with earthy cloves, red wine, cinnamon, and herbs. The original recipe paired the soup with lavender, but Mike’s allergy to the herb led us to rosemary instead.

Recipe after the jump! (more…)

It’s Memorial Day weekend, the official (unofficial?) start to summer.  If you’re like us, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to be grilling and barbecuing more than a few times over the next few months.  Of course you know the difference…right?

I’ll admit, I had to learn the hard way.   Growing up in New Jersey, I always referred to any situation where meat was being cooked outside as a barbecuing.  Burgers, hot dogs, whatever…if it was being cooked over propane or coals, you were barbecuing.

But step outside the northeast, and you’re likely to be met with funny looks if you talk about barbecuing a burger.  Barbecue is low-and-slow cooking that involves smoke, low temperatures and tough cuts of meat that combine to form something magically delicious.  And although you can call any old cookout a barbecue, you can’t call just any cooked meat barbecue.

Need more insight into the different styles of barbecue?  Check out this video that Tim Carman dug up over at the City Paper.

Now that we’ve established the difference between grilling and barbecue, I wanted to share a recipe for homemade barbecue sauce that I used for a community potluck earlier this month.  When word got out that I’ve got some experience with barbecue, I was asked to smoke some up for our new neighborhood.  So I cooked up forty pounds of pork shoulder in a neighbor’s bullet-style smoker, and I decided to go one step further and cook up my own barbecue sauce to go with it.

A while back, I found a barbecue sauce recipe at AmazingRibs.com, a site I’ve used on a couple of occasions as I’ve learned the ins and outs of good homemade ‘cue.  I tried it and found it tasty but not quite what I’d grown accustomed to as I’ve tasted my way around Kansas City.  There were a few flavors that seemed to be missing, most notably tomato, celery seed and cumin.

So I worked with it a bit and came up with the version you can find after the jump. (more…)

If you’ve got a special someone to impress, Valentine’s Day really does take things to a whole new level.  Sure, we all talk a good game about what a made-up, commercialized holiday it is, and how we really don’t even understand what all the fuss is about in the first place.  But even couples who make a pact to ignore the day are loath to tempt the fates and skip the romance altogether.

Seems like a perfect opportunity to celebrate with a nice meal, right?  Unfortunately, Valentine’s Day ranks right up there with New Year’s Eve on the Capital Spice “worst times to dine out” list.  Prix fixe menus (often at inflated prices), crowds of diners and a general lack of inventiveness mean your meal is unlikely to deliver the romantic message you wanted it to.

A better – if not always safer – option is to take what you know about your Valentine’s likes and translate them into a home-cooked meal.  This year , I took the chance to cook up a three-course dinner for Elizabeth, with the goal of putting together a restaurant-quality meal in our new kitchen.

Along the way, I came across a couple of recipes that are likely to make future appearances in my cooking repertoire – a bright, citrus salad from Jose Andres, a savory duck breast/pear combination and a pie that would bring tears to Mrs. Fields’ eyes.

Colors, flavors and peanut butter cookie pie after the jump.

(more…)

Whether you’re calling it Snowpocalypse, Snowmageddon, or just tweeting about it with #snOMG, there’s some no-joke snow coming down outside in Washington.  If you’re planning to drive anywhere…don’t.  Mike just helped push a cop car out of drifted snow in our alley.

If you can walk to your nearest coffee shop, kitchen goods store or watering hole, DO IT (just be smart and call ahead to make sure they’re open).  As the police were getting ready to take off, they even asked “So…you guys drinking yet?”

We may not be drinking yet, but we did take a walk down to Eastern Market with Capital Spice mascot Murphy.  He loves to bound through waist-high snowdrifts, but the accumulation is getting to be a bit much even for him this time around.

When we came home, our neighbors had a real treat for us – an old family recipe for something called “Snow Cream.”  We’d never heard of snow cream before, but the bowl that was handed to us looked delicious and we were eager to dig in.  We took it upstairs and broke out some spoons.

Snow cream, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, is an ice cream-like dessert made from freshly fallen snow.  It uses all the old familiar ingredients – milk (or cream), sugar, vanilla and egg.  In Broadway Beth’s case, the recipe comes from her Southern great-grandmother, but I’m sure there are families all over the country with their own versions of the treat.

According to tradition, you shouldn’t make snow cream from the first snowfall of the year (that’s when all the pollutants come down, dontchaknow?).  Thank goodness we had snow last weekend – even if it didn’t amount to anything – because we’ve got plenty of raw materials to work with today!

Did you stock up on milk and eggs like everyone else yesterday?  Interested in making some snow cream of your own?  It’s actually pretty easy, though the fact that this is an old family recipe means that measurements are largely abandoned in favor of tradition.

Snow Cream

Freshly fallen snow
1 cup milk (whole is preferable, but use what you’ve got), plus more for desired consistency
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla

Once the snow has been falling for a while (check!), place a large bowl mixing bowl outside and let it collect your base.  Meanwhile, mix the remaining ingredients together until the sugar is dissolved – do not heat.

When you’ve gathered enough snow, bring the bowl back inside and pour the cream mixture over the top.  Stir to combine, adding additional milk until you’ve gotten everything to the consistency you’d like.

Enjoy right away, or put it in the freezer to firm up a bit.

And if you feel compelled to go all foodie on this classic, feel free to jazz it up with any of your typical ice cream blend-ins (we’ll probably hold off on the roquefort and honey for now).

Sometimes the best traditions around Thanksgiving aren’t just the food, but what happens around the table once the food has been cleared away.

In my family, the means an insanely competitive game of Spoons among the cousins. Spoons is a card game that is kind of like musical chairs. Start with one deck of cards. Everyone gets four cards.

Put spoons in the middle of the table, using one less spoon that the number of people playing.

Start passing cards one at a time. The first person to get four of a kind grabs the first spoon.

Once the first spoon is claimed, everyone else has their chance to grab a spoon.  Chaos ensues.  Polite families take one and get out of the way. My family? We scatter them to the four winds. Thrown under the table, into other rooms, into the laps of competitors. Its much more fun that way.

The odd person out who does not get a spoon  – because you put down one less than the number of people playing – gets a letter by their name to spell out S-P-O-O-N or J-A-C-K-A-S-S or whatever you want.  But teasing the loser isn’t the fun part. The fun part is watching people completely panic trying to get the last spoon.

We are not above trying to steal them out of someone else’s hand.                                                                                                      

WARNING: This has led to several scars and lost feeling in my pinky for a few days. I got that damn spoon, though.

Photos courtesy of Katie Barnes, my insanely talented cousin. She wisely decides to record, rather than play, Spoons. Her hands are remarkably scar-free.