Leg of Lamb, Swedish Style

Enough with the Passover food, time for Easter.

Well, okay, Easter was last week, but I did cook! It was Easter at Ikea. Or Easterkea? I-Easter? I dunno. We actually just called the whole weekend Eastover.

I had a beautiful leg of lamb in my freezer from a 1/2 lamb we got in October. I really wanted ham, but lamb rhymes with ham and is just as good, if not better.

Usually when I make leg of lamb I use Marcus Samuelsson's recipe from the Aquavit cookbook. However, it was Easter Sunday, and I hadn't really planned it out, so I had to modify the recipe a bit and use what we had in the house.

1/2 cup olive oil
1 cup mustard. I used the Ikea Swedish style mustard you're supposed to serve with Gravlax. It has dill in it, and I thought that couldn't hurt. Grey Poupon is what I usually use, or any Dijon style mustard.
Juice from 1 lemon
Chives, chopped (or whatever fresh herbs you have lying around)
Garlic, chopped
1 tbsp of Greek seasoning. I used this. Cavender's would work nicely, too. Make sure you use the kind with salt.

Mix all of these ingredients together to make a really pretty sauce and spread it all over your leg of lamb. Use all of it. You want to put your leg of lamb in a 275 degree oven and let it cook for 4-5 hours, depending on how done you want it. My leg of lamb was still a bit frozen and so I did 5 hours. A meat thermometer will come in handy here. Make sure the inside is at least 165 degrees. Mine was 180, whoops, but it was totally fine.

Marcus Samuelsson suggests either basting it frequently, or just letting it go and building a nice crust. I like basting mine, but do whatever, I'm not going to tell you how to live your life.

When the lamb is thoroughly cooked, crank the oven to 425 and let it crisp up for about 20 more minutes. Then take it out and tent it for 20 more minutes. This 40 minute interval was used to prep the rest of Easter dinner and cook it, because there's not much you can cook in your oven at 275 degrees so seize the opportunity.

Don't skip the tenting time, because it really lets the juices spread within the entire cut of meat. You'll appreciate that when you're eating it, trust me. I like to cut the whole thing up and put all of the meat back in the pan so it can soak up the cooked sauce that's mixed with the juices from the meat.

A truly random and Swedish/Ikea/Samuelsson inspired Easter dinner. Leg of lamb, asparagus, Hachapuri (okay, so Russian), gravlax on Matzah (okay, what ELSE can one really do with leftover Matzah?), and potatoes au gratin. Delish!

Chopped Liver

AKA, the best damn way to use cow parts.

I don't care if you don't like liver. You're wrong. You like liver, you just don't know it yet.

Okay, fine, liver isn't all that great, unless you're going to dress it up with other strong tasting stuff and make it resemble absolutely nothing liver-y at all.

Livery, you know, like limousines and stuff. I think I'm tired.

It starts off pretty gross. You have to get a pound of raw beef liver and handle it. Use a fork, for crying out loud. Touching raw liver with your hands is gross.

Broil it, for an undisclosed period of time until there's no more pink left. I kind of forgot about it and it got a bit brown, but it was fine. Remember, you're really not going to taste the liver very much, so a bit of crunchy bits is totally fine.

Then I chopped up SIX (yes SIX) onions and carmelized the crap out of them. You're supposed to do it with chicken fat, but for some reason I couldn't get my broth I'd made to bring any up and so I used about a stick of butter. According to my dad, this is the goyishe thing to do, but I wouldn't trust much of what he says. This is, after all, the same man who had me believe for years that my cat went to the old cat's home when he suddenly disappeared from the house.

I guess if you're not Jewish, this is where it gets weird. Pull some chicken skins off of whatever chicken you have and fry them up. This will render a good amount of fat and you're going to want that too.

Last thing you'll need are six (yes SIX) hardboiled eggs. Lucky for me, Passover and Easter kind of collided this year, so I had a few on hand that had cracked already.

So let's take inventory.
Liver
Onions
Chicken skins
Hardboiled eggs

You'll also want some salt and pepper. Oh, and Ritz crackers, if it's not Passover. Ritz crackers and chopped liver are like Boris and Natasha...bread and butter...Jews and Chinese food...you get the idea.

If you don't have a food grinder, well, then I guess you have a bunch of stuff to make chopped liver without an actual implement to make the chopped liver. I don't think a Cuisinart will cut it. I suppose you could bring all of this to the butcher and ask them to grind it all for you, but that's just weird. I suggest you get a food grinder, because you can make fun stuff, like sausage and...sausage.

Once you grind ALL of the ingredients, give it a good mix, taste it and add a bit of salt and pepper. Then taste it again. And again. And again. Soooooo good.

By the way, this does freeze pretty well but ends up a little bit wet, but no one will notice.

My Mom's Brisket

Okay, I'm going to say something I might regret, but this is way better than PW's brisket.

*ducks*

No, really. Maybe it's the fact that I grew up on this brisket. I wouldn't even be exaggerating if I told you it was on the table 3 nights a week at our house growing up, right next to the Stouffer's Spinach Souffle and Syrian rice and kugel.

I had a 5 lb brisket I got at Costco, which was the biggest one they had but per my mom was "too small". Apparently it shrinks in size by 2/3. Anyway, I thought it was lovely. I sliced some onions and lay them on the bottom of the pan and placed the raw brisket on top. I had no idea which side should be up, since the golden rule is usually fat side up but brisket is nothing but fat, it appears. So lay that sucker on those onions and think about butterflies or something.

I made a marinade from 1 cup of Open Pit Onion BBQ Sauce (does anyone else sing their scales to open-pit-bar-be-que-sauce" or is that just me?), 1 cup of ketchup, a generous splash of Worceshireshireshireshirechester sauce, onion powder, seasoned salt, 4 tbsp dark soy sauce (I had Mama Sita's Tapa Marinade) and some brown sugar. Then poured the marinade all over the meat and lay out more sliced onions on top.

This is a really horrible picture, but the steam was preventing my camera (cough-iPhone-cough) from getting a good image. Anyway, I had a 5 lb brisket and the rule is 1 hour per pound at 325 degrees. Every hour or so (give or take) I would pull the pan out of the oven and spoon the sauce over the top to keep it juicy. When I had 1 hour left, I dumped a bunch of chopped carrots in the pan and let it cook the rest of the way.

Crazy, surreal picture of the cooked brisket. At this point I'm supposed to mention that you can take the brisket back to the butcher (if you got the meat from the butcher) and have them slice it. Then again, this is coming from my mother whose favorite expression is "I'll pay for it". If you have a sharp enough knife, it's easy to make some nice, even slices. The thinner the better, but no need to make them paper thin.

I don't think I did a bad job slicing. It tasted divine. Well, as divine as a fatty slab of beef is going to taste, anyway.

Greek Lemon Olive Chicken

Well, it's Greek to me.

Passover is coming up, and my mother insisted I take on more cooking than I'm already doing and serve my guests a chicken dish. Because apparently brisket, kugel, chopped liver and asparagus isn't nearly enough. Actually, now that I type that out, it doesn't seem like enough. Lucky for me, chicken drumsticks are like $10 for a million at Costco. And while everyone is buying a ham for Easter, the chicken drumsticks are pretty much neglected. That or there was a bird flu virus I was not made aware of. It's entirely possible, since I'm the most uninformed person on current events, like, ever.

Start with an incredibly generous amount of olive oil, butter, and chopped garlic in a deep pan. You don't want to make this low fat or anything, because that would just be practical.

The spice mix on the right is probably my favorite seasoning ever. It goes well on lamb, beef, chicken, fish, popcorn, whatever. Buy it for chicken on Passover, use it again the next day to make lamb on Easter. Also grab some sweet paprika and some lemon pepper seasoning.

Now it's time to season the crap out of some chicken. Really, you have it all. You have some sweet from the paprika, sour from the lemon, spice from the pepper, and salt from the Cavender's. Go nuts, don't worry about it being even. As you can tell, I sure didn't. I used drumsticks here, but you can use whatever cut of chicken you want, even an entire chicken. I imagine this recipe might work well with salmon too, but the execution would be different.

Add the chicken to the pan and get it nice and brown, until you can't see the pink from the outside. The inside won't be cooked, but we'll take care of that in a bit. Once it's browned as you like it, squeeze one whole lemon over everything.

I had these yummy mixed pitted Kalamata olives I got from an olive bar at the grocery store sitting in my fridge. I can't resist the olive bar. Anyway, I dumped them over the chicken with lemon and covered the pot and stuck it in the oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Serve with rice pilaf, and spoon a bunch of the juice over the chicken and rice.

String Baskets - Kid Craft that's slightly more Easter oriented than I intended

Ever since I saw this idea here I thought my kids would have fun with this one. Until I remembered that Yaya hates messy fingers.

Start with a crap ton of YARN. This totally looks like a poster for something. YARN POWER! Snip off some strands in various colors about equal in length. They definitely don't have to be perfect, but good enough.

We always seem to have red plastic cups around. Because we have weekly frat parties, now you know. Next week: leftover keg crafting for kids. Cover a few cups in plastic wrap. Have your Mod Podge ready because you're going to need a ton of it.

I poured some Mod Podge out on some disposable plates and then we all sat together in our pajamas and dipped the strings in the Podge and lay them on the plastic wrap covered cups.

Demon also hated the Mod Podge on his hands, but he got over it.

We let these dry for about 48 hours. I'm thinking I need to take the cups and plastic off sooner next time and let these dry without the mold a bit longer, because I managed to get the cup out but not the plastic wrap. Is it noticeable? I think it looks fine, but now I know for next time!

A perfect place for our "cactigai", as we like to call them around these parts.

Korean Food Not Actually Cooked by my MIL

All week long I've been watching Full House. Not the version with the Olsen twins, the Korean drama with my boyfriend, Bi Rain.

Okay, he's not my boyfriend, but I have this thing for Korean boys, hence why I married one and decided to use his DNA to create offspring and stuff.

Basically all they do on this show is eat, fight, eat, look cute, eat, almost kiss, and get married a few times. The eating is what was killing me. Over and over and over again, and so of course I was dying to partake in the eating part. And maybe a bit of the making out with my fake Korean boyfriend. Just kidding babe, love you!

My MIL makes this awesome chicken. I wanted it. I had to figure it out and I came pretty damn close to how she makes it.

I took....
3 heaping tbsp red pepper paste (Gochujang)
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ginger paste
1/2 Korean pear, grated and the juice squeezed out (use the gratings, not the juice)
3 green onions, chopped
1 tbsp Mirin
1 tbsp soy sauce
3 tsp red pepper flakes
Mix all of the above with 4 chicken thighs pounded flat. You could ideally use breasts, but ugh, why would you want to?

I made my husband grill this while I made other stuff. He grills, I cook, it's a fair deal, and rather cliche. To accompany this you can make white rice, wash some Romaine lettuce leaves, and marinade some Julienned green onions with 1 tsp sesame oil, black pepper, salt and red pepper.

Take a leaf of Romaine, fill with rice, top with the chicken (I cut mine into small pieces), then top with the marinated green onions. Oh, this was heaven. I so needed this.

Coasters!

I've been seeing tutorials for these all over the place and so I had to try them. Cheap + Easy = My Kind of Craft.

You'll need 4x4 tiles. I got these from Home Depot in the bathroom tile aisle for 16 cents each. I bought 6, and the lady at the register had to ring each one up by punching in the serial number or whatever. Had I bought 10 she would have had to enter it only once. Next time I'm getting at least 20.

You'll also need Mod Podge, Craft paper (or whatever you want to use), foam, silicone glue (I used the kind I use for my marble magnets) and a brush of some sort. I used a foam brush.

Start by cutting out squares of paper that are 4x4. You'll want them to be just slightly smaller than the tiles but luckily 4x4 tiles are actually slightly larger than 4x4. If anyone knows why, I'd love to hear it.

Next you want to lay your tile down on a flat surface and Mod Podge it. See that mad blur? That's my hand as it layeth the Mod Podge down. You want to work kind of fast and get the paper down on the Mod Podge as quickly as possible and smooth it out so there are no air bubbles. Air bubbles don't go away once the paper is attached and the Mod Podge dries quickly.

Do I really have that many rings on? Wow. Anyway, once you get the paper attached, let it dry a few minutes and then add a layer of Mod Podge on top to seal it. You want to do 3 coats total, and let it dry about 10-20 minutes between coats. Go feed your children or something.

These came out so pretty. Once they are dry, glue a 4x4 piece of foam (or cork or felt) to the back with silicone sealer. If you want to give them as gifts tie them up in a stack with a pretty ribbon.

Leftover Night

I love taking 6 different things in my fridge and making a meal out of them. My friend calls it "Musgo Night", as in everything must go. I think that's brilliant.

I had...
-leftover shredded spicy pork
-empanada wrappers
-coconut lime sauce
-cilantro lime rice
-pineapple corn jalapeno relish
-grilled pesto chicken
-cilantro pesto
-spaghetti noodles

I defrosted a pack of Goya empanada wrappers and filled them with the shredded pork. Of course I fried them. Every time I bake empanadas it's just not as good.

Deep fry action shot! Have I mentioned that I use my little Le Crueset pot for just about everything? It's perfect for deep frying because you can use a small amount of oil and it doesn't spatter.

I had some leftover grilled pesto chicken. Basically I took chicken thighs, pounded the crap out of them, basted them with cilantro pesto I made last weekend and grilled them. I've been making salads and sandwiches with it all week long. So tonight I just boiled spaghetti noodles, added the grilled chicken and another spoonful of pesto and tossed it together with a little bit more Parmesan.

I also had about 12 butterfly Market Day shrimp, so I just popped those in the oven with some coconut lime sauce to drizzle on when they were cooked all the way. I made the coconut lime sauce by simmering some coconut milk, 3 tbsp of powdered sugar and lime juice for about 10 minutes, then adding about 1.5 tsp of corn starch mixed with 3 tbsp of cold water at the end and simmering for 5 more minutes. Tastes like candy. I figured these would go well with my leftover cilantro lime rice I'd made for taco night this past Monday.

A very strange combination, but everything tasted really good together!