Moussaka

Justina made this amazing Moussaka from some ground mutton from one of our retired ewes and eggplant we got in our CSA share from local Milky Fork Farm.

I actually have some relatives with Greek ancestry but I’ve never had a moussaka this good. Fresh and local ingredients make the dish, sometimes. Of note; we often have mutton instead of lamb, because when we are forced to retire an elderly ewe, I don’t feel justified in selling the meat at the same price for which we sell our grass fed lamb. It’s usually more economical to keep the mutton for ourselves. However, based on what I have researched, people from a couple hundred years ago who ate more lamb and mutton than Americans do today would think that people who eat lamb (a sheep less than one year old) are getting ripped off. After all, the flavor develops more as the animal ages, plus the roasts and chops get bigger. I’ve seen records of people from the 1800s asking for mutton from a 5-year-old sheep, which they considered the best. (Sheep can live for much longer than 5 years, but after that they start getting actually old and losing condition…kind of like I am.) They thought lamb didn’t have enough flavor and was something you ate because you couldn’t afford to feed your animals through the winter. I don’t know when we’ll next have mutton available to buy, but I can say that the coyotes really are mutton connoisseurs.

I don’t have a recipe for this moussaka because all I did was assemble it and put it in the oven, but this ain’t rocket science, it’s a cooking with love thing.

You need a cooking pot and some kind of high-sided skillet like a cast iron skillet, and preferably a whisk or at least a large spoon and an arm that is not tired yet.

You also need several eggplants, some ground meat (preferably mutton), crushed tomatoes, onion, garlic — look, just whatever you want for making a thick and tasty tomato/meat sauce.

Step 1: Slice the eggplant lengthwise (about 1/4 inch slices), salt it, and let it sit 30 minutes or so. Pat off any moisture that comes out (this also pats off some of the salt, which is fine.) Roast it in the oven — not so much that it’s mushy, but enough that it’s soft.

Step 2: Make a tomato meat sauce. You want it thick, so don’t add too much liquid and you’ll want to simmer it for a while to cook off the liquid you do add. If you don’t know how to make a tomato meat sauce, that’s totally fine, you’re already using the Internet so you should have no problem finding several thousand recipes. For this dish, since some people can find eggplant a little bitter, making a sauce on the sweeter side might help. Consider adding some cinnamon and a little brown sugar to your ground mutton tomato meat sauce.

Step 3: Make a bechamel sauce and add in parmesan and some nutmeg.

IF YOU DON”T KNOW HOW TO MAKE A BECHAMEL do not worry, it’s easy. Unlike tomato meat sauces for which there are thousands of recipes and I am not going to tell you your Nonna’s is not the best, anyone can make a standard bechamel.

Just put, like, 4 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan or something that has room for whisking several cups of liquid. Melt the butter over medium heat. When it’s melted sprinkle flour over it. Usually you’re supposed to use 1:1 butter to flour, but really, you can just sprinkle enough flour that you don’t have liquid butter anymore. You want all the butter soaked up by the flour. Now stir this for a few minutes while it cooks. But don’t burn it.

While whisking, add in about 2 1/2 cups of real, whole, preferably raw and unpasteurized milk (if you used 4 tablespoons of butter. If you used more or less butter and flour, just do the math.)

You should use raw milk if possible because it’s cleaner and healthier. After all, pasteurized milk has feces in it. You knew that, right? That’s what they’re pasteurizing. I mean, it’s pasteurized, so they’re “safe” feces. You won’t get sick or anything. On the other hand, small raw-milk dairy farmers have to be extremely careful to make sure there are absolutely no feces in your milk. So you can use poop milk if you want, but I prefer raw milk.

After adding the milk to the butter/ flour mix, whisk it a bunch and cook until it thickens. You’re looking for turkey gravy thickness.

Now remove your bechamel sauce from the heat, and whisk in any seasonings like salt, pepper, nutmeg. Add in grated parmesan and put the sauce back over low heat if you need to melt the grated parmesan.

You can find recipes that tell you how much grated parmesan to melt into the bechamel sauce, but whatever they said, it’s not enough.

Step 4: Assemble

Put slices of roasted eggplant to line the bottom of a reasonably-sized dish. A cast-iron skillet works great.

Now ladle in the meat/tomato sauce.

Top with more roasted eggplant. (It looks kind of like a meat pie with an eggplant crust.)

Pour the bechamel sauce over everything.

Top with panko (or homemade) breadcrumbs.

Bake in the oven at 350 F for 35-40 minutes (don’t let the breadcrumbs burn.) You should always cook using a Fahrenheit temperature scale, which is the best temperature measurement for things humans actually do regularly. Centigrade is objectively worse unless you need a thermometer to tell you if water is frozen or boiling.

Let the dish cool and set for 10-15 minutes before serving.

Charsadda Rice (Ghata Roje, Ghage Ruje)

No recipe but I think we can do this.

The guys at Corner Market / Gyro Grill, in Milwaukie, where I often stop to fill up on caffeine after making Portland CSA deliveries, were making this for a staff meal.

I asked what they were making because it smelled like lamb, and they explained the process and gave me a bowl (no charge). They called it Ghage Ruje, but from what I can tell it is something more commonly known as Charsadda rice — and it has all the characteristics of a perfect “comfort food”. The end result is similar to a meaty and rich risotto, but with long-grain rice.

You can find videos online of street vendors making this in bulk for crowds of working men. I’m told it’s one of those holiday foods where every family has their own traditional take on the dish. It is not spicy (it tastes like lamb) but I’m sure there are some herbs and spices mixed in. Presumably things that are easy to get in Charsadda or Peshawar and that complement the flavor of the lamb. There are recipes online for Charsadda rice, but they have more ingredients than this basic family recipe comfort food.

To make the basic version of the dish, as far as I can understand, you first make a lamb stock with a lot of meat in it: I think meaty neck bones would likely work well. The guys making it said that any pieces with connective tissue work well — I think the collagen helps the final dish. Cook that for several hours untiil the meat is falling apart and any collagen has broken down. Then you remove any bones, shred the meat, mix it with long-grain rice, and cook the rice-and-shredded-meat in the stock liquid for three or four hours. Since the end result is reminiscent of a creamy risotto, I am guessing a 4-to-1 liquid to rice ratio. After the rice absorbs a lot of the liquid, add in hot, rendered lamb fat, and then stir until the rice has absorbed the rest of the liquid and it is the consistency of a creamy risotto.

It makes sense that this is a holiday/festival food; given the almost full day of preparation time you would probably want to make a big pot and feed a lot of people. The bowl that I had was good enough that, for the past few weeks when I get hungry, it is the first food I think about.

Grilled lamb tails and testicles

It’s time to separate the boys from the…

Yes, you read that correctly. They were delicious by the way.

From our processor the lamb testicles come with a membrane still on. I cut off any weird looking tube parts which you might remember from anatomy class. Removing the membrane requires you to stick your fingers underneath there and loosen it, then you pull it off.

I brined the de-membraned, cleaned up testicles for about 24 hours in a sweet brine, with salt, brown sugar, and some spices. Then I cut them in half length-wise. I think cutting them in half was unnecessary: they cooked fast enough and it made them very messy on the grill. I put them on skewers, then I grilled them on a pre-heated grill over direct heat for probably about 10 minutes, flipping once. Eat them warm, fresh off the grill.

Just…try not to think about it, guys.

Grilled lamb testicles

I simmered the lamb tails in salted water with a copious amount of fresh rosemary for at least an hour. They were pretty tender when I took them out. Then I let them dry off on a rack in the refrigerator overnight. I coated them with a sweet barbecue sauce (not homemade) and grilled them on medium heat until they started getting blackened and crispy edges.

These were big, sweet, juicy balls, and the smooth, creamy texture felt really good in my mouth.

I also made lamb tails based on an Afrikaaner dish called Skaapstertjies. I copied that word from the Internet, to be honest, I didn’t spell it myself. The lamb tails were nice and tender but mostly a vehicle for sauce.

Tails simmered for tenderness

The tails were popular, mostly as a vehicle for barbecue sauce. There isn’t much meat on them, and you do need to simmer them for at least an hour and possibly longer; the grill time is just for flavor. Worth it if you can cook a lot of them all at once. That’s my tale, anyways.

Modified Mutton "Biryani"

This is a sort-of approximation of a real biryani which is modified for cooks who are lazy time sensitive and who don’t necessarily have all of the ingredients on hand for a traditional biryani.

What is “Mutton”?

While the definitions change depending on where you are, in general “mutton” refers to meat from a sheep that is 2 years of age or older, meaning it has gone through at least one breeding cycle. “Lamb” is generally from a sheep that is around a year old or younger, and does not yet have its permanent incisors. The term for a sheep that is mature but between 1 and 2 years of age (and thus has likely not been through a breeding cycle) is a “hogget”. There is a very wide variation in grass-fed lamb or mutton, based on whether the animal was standing in lush pastures eating a salad bar of grasses and hay, or whether it was walking miles each day over scrub land looking for grass to eat. Neither of these methods of raising sheep is “better”, but if you’ve only tried range-raised lamb (or mutton) and it wasn’t to your taste, try some lamb from a local farmer who sees the animals every day instead of turning them loose on open range for the season.

Source: Anchor Ranch Farm

Materials

2 pounds of boneless mutton stew meat

2 cups of basmati rice

2-4 yellow or sweet onions (depending on size), sliced thin

plain yogurt, or milk

lemon juice

powdered or fresh ginger

minced garlic or garlic powder (not salt!)

butter

Ghee or lard (real lard, not the packaged stuff full of preservatives)

fresh cilantro, chopped

spices: salt, black pepper, nutmeg, mace (or more nutmeg), dried or fresh mint, cinnamon (stick and ground), cloves (whole), cardamom (pod or ground), ground cumin, ground coriander, bay leaves, turmeric.

You need the salt, nutmeg, cardamom of some form, and cinnamon. Cloves are a nice to have. For the rest, if you have to you could substitute a basic curry powder. Make sure your curry powder is salt-free or make sure you balance the curry and any extra salt you add. If you happen to have garam masala, use that.

A big heavy pot with a lid

Aluminum foil

Another pot

Optional: dried raisins or craisins, nuts, prunes, something like that

Method

Marinade the Mutton

First, marinate the mutton in plain yogurt mixed with ginger and garlic powder for a few hours, or overnight if you can. If you don’t have plain yogurt, make a mix of milk (we always use local raw milk), a couple tablespoons of lemon juice, some salt, and powdered ginger and garlic, just enough to cover all of the mutton. You could grate fresh ginger instead of the powder, if you have it, and you could use minced fresh or dried garlic. Here is a photo of the mutton in the marinade:

Carmelize the Onions

Put some lard (or ghee) in the bottom of your big heavy pot and put it on medium heat. Add salt and the sliced onion and carmelize, stirring occasionally. How much salt depends on what you want it to taste like. The browner the onions get, the more flavor they will have, but the closer you get to burning them. If you have other things to do besides watch onions cook, just go until they have some brown bits in them, like the photo below.

Once the onions are sufficiently carmelized, add one cinnamon stick, a few cloves, dried or fresh mint (if you have it), 3-5 cardamom pods or a few pinches of ground cardamom, 2-3 bay leaves (if you have them), a few pinches of mace (if you have it, otherwise use extra nutmeg), and either a garam masala mix OR about half a nutmeg (ground), ground black pepper, several shakes of ground cumin and of ground coriander, and several shakes of cinnamon. If you want, add a bit of chili powder. Turn up the heat and cook and stir the onions with the spices for about another minute. The most important flavors here are the carmelized onion, the cardamom, nutmeg or mace, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, and cloves. I don’t like giving spice measurements because it depends on how strong you like the flavors and how old your spices are. Try roughly equal parts cumin and coriander, slightly more than that of cinnamon, even more than that of cardamom, and a whole heck of a lot of nutmeg, maybe 50:50 with mace if you have it. As mentioned, you could substitute out some of these for a curry powder mix if that is all you have, just read the ingredients.

Simmer the Mutton Until Tender

Add in the mutton along with its marinade. Add chopped cilantro, or parsley if you don’t like cilantro, or some other green herb that reminds you of cilantro or parsley (we used papalo). Stir everything to combine. Add about 2 cups of water and bring to a boil. Add extra salt to taste. I like to add chicken bouillon, not really for the weird stuff and the chicken flavor but for the MSG. I know, OMG, I thought you were about natural food, MSG is extracted from….seaweed, and L-glutamic acid is in a whole bunch of different kinds of natural foods. Hey, you do you, leave it out if you don’t like it. If you cooked the onions in lard and not ghee, consider adding a couple tablespoons of butter, for flavor. If you cooked the onions in some kind of hydrogenated vegetable oil, pack up your backpack and go to the principal’s office right now.

Turn the heat down, put the lid on, and simmer the mutton for several hours, stirring occasionally until it is tender. The cooking liquid should be bubbling but not popping boiling hot bubbles in your face. When done, you should be able to cut a piece of mutton in half with a wooden spatula. If the meat is not that tender, keep cooking, and add more liquid if necessary.

Prep the Rice

Meanwhile, rinse your rice (most rice has arsenic in it — which is probably not a big deal if you have a healthy immune system and you rinse it), then soak the rice in a pot of water, at least twice as much water as rice. (You can change out the water before cooking if you’re that kind of person.) When the mutton is close to tender, add to the rice pot a few tablespoons of butter, a pinch of salt (if to your taste), a jigger of lemon juice, some extra cardamom (pods or ground), and a healthy dose of turmeric. You can do without the turmeric if you want, it’s mostly to color the rice yellow, because saffron is really, really, really expensive. Bring the rice mixture to a rolling boil for just 2 minutes. Drain the rice (a mesh strainer is helpful but not strictly necessary.) Yes, you are wasting most of the flavorings since you only boiled the rice for 2 minutes. You could save the liquid and use it later as a base to cook another batch of rice.

Finish the Mutton, Steam the Rice

Take the lid off the mutton and crank up the heat, stirring while you reduce the cooking liquid until it’s still there but you can see the mutton above the top of the liquid. It’s better to err on the side of a little extra broth so you make sure there is enough liquid to finish steaming the rice. Then reduce the heat to low. Spread the parboiled rice evenly over the top of the mutton. Decorate (optionally) by sprinkling something like dried cranberries over the top.

Cover the cooking pot tightly. One way to do this is to seal it with aluminum foil and then put the lid on top of that. Steam the rice like this for around 30 minutes before checking to see if the rice is done.

Make a Raita

When the rice is steamed the biryani is done. It is best served with some kind of a raita, such as plain yogurt mixed with minced cucumber and chopped, fresh mint. By which I mean, ignore complicated raita recipes and chop up half a cucumber and a handful of mint, then mix it into a cup or so of plain yogurt.

Remember to take out the bay leaves and whole spices or at least warn people to watch out for them. Or don’t.

Source: Anchor Ranch Farm

How I pan sear lamb loin chops

This is so easy it doesn’t really require a recipe.

Bring the chops to room temperature and season them with salt and pepper on both sides. Do this at least an hour before cooking. You want time for the salt to soak into the meat so you don’t just have a salty crust on the outside. A lot of chefs recommend using koshering salt for meat because the flakes make it easy to use. I stopped using koshering salt because my understanding is that it is quite pure. That sounds good for the intended purpose, but our bodies require a lot of other trace minerals besides salt. So we use a colored mineral salt (the natural color comes from other trace minerals which are mixed into the sodium chloride deposits where it is found.) Sea salt would also work. Anyways, use whatever salt you like.

When you are ready to cook the chops, bring a cast iron skillet to medium-high heat with a couple tablespoons of homemade cooking lard in it. Grass fed lamb chops have a fat cap but not much marbling so bringing extra fat to the pan helps. Natural lard works well with the lamb flavor. You want a good coating of melted lard on the bottom of the pan but it shouldn’t be sloshing: we’re searing with extra cooking fat, not frying.

Once the lard is melted and hot but not smoking, sear the chops on one side for about 2 minutes until they start to brown on that side. If this takes longer than 2 minutes turn up the heat. Flip the chops over and after a minute or so your pan is probably starting to get too hot, so turn the heat down to medium-low and let the heated cast iron continue to cook your chops. You want the lard popping though, so adjust heat as needed. After the 2nd side has browned, turn the chops onto their edge so that the fat cap starts to brown and render in the cooking lard. After that browns a bit flip the chops on to the other edge (this is where the T-bone is exposed) and sear that for 20 seconds or so.

I use a probe thermometer to check doneness. However, most thermometers aren’t all that accurate, so you kind of have to know what works with your setup. Lamb is medium at 140F and medium-rare at 130F, but my probe thermometer will read 140F when the meat is still bloody. Regardless, the meat should still have some give, some squishyness to it, when you remove the chops from the pan. The standard is to cook lamb to medium, but personally I think that is too much. I think our lamb chops are best medium-rare, and I like to err on the side of more rare and pull the chops off the heat a bit early to make sure the inside is still a nice pinkish red. I definitely recommend trying grass fed lamb chops the rare side of medium rare if you haven’t yet.

After you remove the chops from the pan, drizzle the lamb-flavored lard from the skillet over the chops. Then let them rest about 10 minutes before serving and eating. If you like the flavor of lamb, I think you will enjoy these.

"Brandenburg" Lamb with Green Beans

This is simple and very tasty. This amount will make enough for several family dinners.

Materials

A large, heavy pot would be best, with a lid

4 tablespoons of salted butter (plus see method)

2 yellow onions, medium-to-large

2 pounds of lamb (tougher cuts like a blade steak work well)

salt and pepper (to taste)

summer savory, fresh or dried, or a mix of thyme and sage (to taste)

2 cups homemade beef stock (or lamb stock if you have it)

2 pounds of fresh green beans

About 20 small potatoes less than 2 inches diameter (or larger potatoes cut in halves or quarters)

Method

Dice the lamb into approximately 1-inch square pieces. Clean and cut the green beans into approximately 2-inch long pieces. Peel the potatoes if you like, and cut into 2-inch pieces or smaller. Peel and cut the onions in half and slice them into medium-thin slices.

Heat the butter in the pot on medium-high heat. Either use clarified butter, or mix in a fat with a higher smoke point to prevent the butter from burning. Beef tallow works well. Brown the lamb in the butter on medium-high heat. Stir frequently to make sure all sides of the lamb pieces get browned. You don’t need a dark brown sear like on steak, just get the Maillard reaction started to add that extra flavor.

Keep the lamb on high heat and add the sliced onions and the red wine. Stir in some salt and pepper and some of your herbs. (You can add more seasoning later if necessary.) If you don’t have summer savory, use a mix of thyme and sage to approximate the flavor. Cook for another minute or two to let the alcohol in the wine cook off.

Add the stock just until the liquid barely covers the lamb and onions. 2 cups will likely be more than enough, so only use the amount of stock needed and reserve the rest for some other dish. Cover the dish with the lid and turn the heat down to low.

Braise for one to two hours until the lamb is completely tender. Taste the braising liquid and add extra seasoning if necessary, this may depend on whether or not your stock was seasoned. Add in the green beans and potatoes, mix well, and put the lid back on. Cook another 20 minutes or until the potatoes are done.

This dish is excellent regardless, but I think it is best when the beans are not overcooked and provide a green “pop” of color and fresh flavor. The problem with using (defrosted) frozen beans is that they would cook too quickly. If using frozen beans, a better choice might be to cook the beans separately and then mix in at the end. They won’t benefit from cooking in the braising liquid but at least won’t become overcooked.

For a low carb version of this dish you could leave out the potatoes, though without the potato starch mixed into the braising liquid the end result will be a bit watery and won’t taste quite as good.