wendy’s recipe file–braised lamb shanks with parsnips, fennel, and orange peel

I have mixed feelings about lamb.  Sheep are my favorite animal, and they give us so much lovely wool without having to give up their lives.  Yet there are lamb fans in my family, and I have to admit it does taste good and was eaten with regularity by my Middle Eastern ancestors.  Maybe if we just love the sheep and respect its many sacrifices for our pleasure.  (now that’s a predator speaking). If you recoil at using lamb, beef short ribs or pork shoulder will do, though they don’t complement these particular flavors as well.  Any of these braised meats are economical and warming on cold winter days.  (see my previous post on those cold winter days).

 

BRAISED LAMB SHANKS WITH PARSNIPS, FENNEL, AND ORANGE PEEL

6 smallish lamb shanks

healthy splash olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

3 carrots, chopped

4 ribs celery, chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

1 T tomato paste

1 cup dry red wine

3 cups chicken or beef broth (I like the kind in aseptic containers)

1 orange

3 four inch sprigs fresh rosemary (use dried if necessary)

3 cinnamon sticks

2 bay leaves

3 fennel bulbs, quartered

4-5 parsnips, cut into three inch lengths

Gremolata:  1/4 cup minced fresh parsley; 1 tsp minced fresh rosemary; 1 clove garlic, minced; finely grated zest of one orange; sea salt

1) Season the lamb shanks with salt and pepper.  In a large Dutch oven, heat the olive oil over medium high heat.  Suate the lamb shanks until browned on all sides (this may take a couple shifts),

2)  Add the onions, carrots, and celeryand saute until the onion is tender.  Add the garlic and tomato paste and continue cooking for 1 minute.  Add wine, scraping up any browned bits from the pan.  Add the broth and bring to a simmer.

3) Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 350.  Peel off the orange peel with a vegetable peeler; reserve.  Arrange the lamb shanks in a large roasting pan.  Pour the broth/vegetable mixture over the meat and add teh orange peeol, rosemary, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves.  Cover the pan tightly with aluminum foil, put in the oven and bake for an hour and a half, turning the lamb shanks every 30 minutes.

4)  while the lamb is cooking prepare the parsnips and fennel.  Add them to the meat after the hour and a half cooking time, seasoning lightly with salt and pepper.  Recover with foil and cook another 45 minutes or so until meat is very tender.  Meanwhile, mix gremolata ingredients together in a bowl.

5) using tongs, remove lamb and vegetables and put on a serving platter.  Remove bay leaf, cinnamon sticks, orange peel, and any woody stems from the rosemary.  Puree the remaining juices in a blender or food processor. Spoon sauce over meat and vegetables.  Sprinkle with gremolata.

I’m dreaming of a white christmas…not

Well, actually a white Christmas is nice enough, if the pesty flakes made a pretty display that day and then conveniently melted by the next morning.  Yesterday, on my cold-loving husband’s birthdya, snow blanketed the city most romantically but then froze in place and apparently has decided to stay for awhile. Schools are closed, not that I have the slightest desire to back out of our icy driveway and slither at five miles an hour down our steep hill.  However, that does leave me with a cooped up eight year old to entertain, no way to get out and review the sports bars I’m supposed to be reviewing, pick up holiday gifts, or pretty much anything else I want to do.  I have zero desire to go sledding on two inches of ice in twenty degree weather, which leaves us with indoor activities.  Today that consisted of spending several hours building a gingerbread house that kept collapsing.  Finally, when the roof developed a major crack and even Elmer’s glue couldn’t hold the gingerbread pieces together, we gave up and threw it out.  I can’t even do Nordic crafts.  The hot water disappears from the faucet before I can finish the dishes and our toilet is frozen.

Hawaii, in my opinion, posesses the ideal temperature for human beings.  The air there always feels perfectly comfortable.  You awake to the sound of birds and chickens, not snowplows.  You don’t need clothes.  You scarcely need shelter.  so, being in a welcoming environment like that, I feel expansive, loose and easy.  My skin glows.  I bubble with energy.  And, truth be told, I don’t really mind POrtland’s normal state of gray temperateness either.  The moody drip drip of rain is an invitation to drink coffee, write, read, knit, cook and eat, maybe even go for a misty walk.  But this Arctic stuff, forget it.  You need twenty zillion items of clothing just to venture outdoors, and even then the wind stings my face and my fingers get numb.  Some types (the same Nordic types who think skiing is fun or think dark beer and sausages constitute a tasty meal) get ruddy and healthy looking in this weather, my skin just gets sallow and my hair frizzy.  I would like to curl up and hibernate like a bear until the weather warms up above freezing, but tomorrow will find me sewing a fabric hamburger (hopefully with better results than the gingerbread house) and if my son is antsy enough putting on the twenty items of clothing, stepping out in the ice and snow, and letting him throw snowballs at my neck.

come to think of it, how about a nice eighty degree Christmas?

soundtrack to my life

For the past two and a half weeks KINK-FM has been celebrating their fortieth birthday by playing the songs of each year of their existence, starting with their “birth” in 1968. It’s been a curiously compelling experience.  I find myself listening for several hours every day.

I can think of three reasons for this. For one thing, I am a radio listener.  I Couldn’t care less about TV, but the radio is always on. Secondly, Nothing brings me back so viscerally to a certain time and place than music, and thirdly, while I’m a little older than KINK, 1968 pretty much coincides with the beginning of my radio-listening life.  So for the past couple weeks I’ve been waking up and finding myself in a different year. Meanwhile presidents are elected, wars start and end, I go through my teen years, go to college, get married, have four children, live in Maryland, Wisconsin, Boston, Chicago, New York, Portland.

First came 1968-1969, filled with iconic songs that are so much a part of my life that I no longer remember when I first heard them.  Then 1970-72, plenty more great classic songs but now tied into specific memories of high school  Then the Vietnam war ends, the “sixties” as we know them slowly dissipate–and–is there a connection?–the creative energy of the music enters a slow decline.  The actual physical energy of the music seems to dissipate.  The lyrics lack power.  A horrible disco influence seeps in.  The music  reaches its nadir around 1977. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of this music hasn’t stood the test of time.  NO Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan here, a lot of one-hit wonders.  Then, a temporary pick up.  I wake up to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and I’m right back in Chicago, Roger’s Park.  Artists like Bruce Springsteen and Mark Knopfler (in Dire Straits) make their first appearance.  Reagan gets elected and everything takes a downhill turn again, bottoming out in 1983-84, when I am transported to our roach-infested apartment in Douglaston, Queens, as my two toddler daughters run about and my husband jumps up and down on a jogging trampoline to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. And Duran Duran, yuk. Still, bright points pop up.  U2.  The Police. John Cougar Mellencamp.  Phil Collins, who I retain an odd affection for.

Now we’re in the mid-1980’s, 1987 to be exact. I woke up yesterday to “the future is so bright I’ve gotta wear shades”.  The eighties are humming along, the music fast, contrived, kind of artificial yet cheery and appealing in its own bizarre way:  Robert Palmer, Genesis, Prince.  That bizarre song where everybody Wang Chungs tonight.  I never figured out what exactly it meant to wang chung, but no matter, I’m back in my thong and leg warmers at aerobics class.

Yet every now and then Jackson Browne or Bruce Cockburn pokes a song in, reminding us that there’s a real world out there.  And underneath runs REM with a moodier harmony that will soon burst into flower with grunge.  The nineties will feel more current, and the music will regain the raw energy of the sixties, in a new, more self aware guise.

The eighties fascinate me, though, probably because the music–and the clothes, and so much else of the culture of the decade–exist in their own time-limited bubble.  The sixties  and early seventies formed who i am and have never fully gone away.  The eighties of course also formed who I am , but so much about them feels aberrant, a ten year dream, a lot of fun at times.  Yet you might say both the sixties and the eighties have come to an end now.  The sixties because by the election of Barack Obama we have transcended the conflicts of that time.  The eighties because their whole political/economic foundation, as begun by the Reagan Revolution has run its course and collapsed with a bang.

See you tomorrow in 1988.