Lamb Guinness Stew

This was so, so good. It was the centerpiece of our Scotch-themed dinner party. I like making stews the night before, and then removing the fat that comes to the surface when you refrigerate it, to make a less greasy stew. This isn’t a necessary step, if you want to make this for same-day eating, but just a tip. A Cooking Light recipe.

Cassoulet

Ok, this was pretty exciting. Yes, I spent three days on it. Yes, boneless lamb and duck are super expensive. And yet, worth it. A showpiece recipe from Cooking Light.

The next time I make it, I’d go with a milder sausage, like chicken and garlic. I bet you could also swap in chicken for SOME of the duck meat, but not all, as it really adds to the flavor. I didn’t rinse the duck, which made mine saltier, but I like salt.

Zahav-Inspired Lamb with Chickpeas and Pomegranate

This recipe is a doozy but turns out really terrific.

I was leaning towards serving lamb for Egg Wars, and it was John’s idea to build the meal around a similar one we had at Philly-based Israeli restaurant Zahav. There, we had braised lamb, pita and a ton of vegetarian mezze sides to go with it. I miraculously actually found their lamb recipe online, and made up some veggie sides to pair with it, based on my vague memory of what we had.

Now, this recipe is time consuming and kind of epic. I will say that my brine wasn’t quite as intense as the one mentioned (I didn’t have enough of the ingredients), but beyond that I stuck to this recipe and its 80 zillion steps. The picture below doesn’t do it justice. I substituted lamb leg for lamb shoulder without issue.

Vegetarian sides included hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh, Moroccan carrots and beet and sumac salad (some recipes to follow). I also grilled asparagus and served some dill white beans as full side dishes.

Pork Stock

Ok, I’m not convinced that many of you will have an 18 pound pork leg carcass hanging around, but should you find yourself in such a predicament, it makes for some quite lovely stock that I plan to use for leftover pork “Pho” (from a recipe Becky sent me) later this week.

Hunan Lamb

This is the first recipe I made out of a cookbook my sister-in-law picked out for me for Christmas. It’s taken from the Shun Lee Cookbook (via a Food & Wine collection of various cookbook recipes). The taste was pretty authentic, though I found the semi deep frying step a little daunting (I hedged a little).

WW Slowcooker Lamb Stew

This kicked ass for being a simple slow cooker recipe. It’s also low on points and meat (mostly because this was all the lamb I had on hand), and high on flavor. Here’s the original recipe, which uses stew meat rather than ground meat, and considerably more of it.

Lamb Ragout w/ Mint

Lamb is one of my favorite foods, so I was definitely interested when I saw this recipe in Cooking Light for Farfalle w/ Lamb Ragout, Ricotta and Mint. But I put the ingredients into the WW recipe generator, and even a Cooking Light recipe came in at 11 points!

I decided to shrink the pasta serving size, and cut down on the oil and ricotta (lamb’s high in points, but a little is going a long way here already). The result meant the sauce/pasta ratio was a little off, but I still thought it worked out well. We were fortunate enough to use local, grass-fed lamb for this recipe.

Smothered Lamb Chops

Based this off a Food & Wine recipe for smothered chicken legs. The lamb adds its own flavor to the (delicious) sauce, though I bet chicken would be a more neutral platform for it. This was great served over some leftover cheesy polenta.

Leftover Lamb Biryani

Sick of lamb posts yet?

Food & Wine served me well tonight, with the building blocks of this recipe and a yummy squash/chickpea side dish – both Indian-influenced.

Leftover Lamb Stew

A great way to use up leftover lamb from, say, a rotisseried leg.