This past Tuesday, SAVEUR hosted its first annual Summer BBQ at Pier 66 in New York for the magazine’s chef and foodie friends. I spent much of the day running around in search of things like passion fruit puree for specialty cocktails for one of our advertisers, greeting chefs and their teams, making sure the bar stayed stocked, and trying to find someone to pull town tarps when it started to rain… All in all, I had a blast and officially love my new job.
Look for me and my gray hat.
Image courtesy of newyork.metromix.com
Once everyone had left and things were mostly cleaned up, we were instructed to take as much home as you can. Really? Yes. This meant bottles of wine and rum that were left over, goodie bags, freshly squeezed lime juice, you name it. People gathered what they could carry (which was nowhere near everything), but no one went toward a lonely little cooler full of lamb left to us by chef Victor Casanova. I feared the worst: that all of that beautiful lamb would be left to rot on the pier with no refrigeration. Sufficiently upset, I grabbed the whole thing on the way out, added a few bottles of wine and some cage-free eggs that another chef had left behind, and carried my heavy load out to the West Side Highway to grab a cab home.
The loot. It looked like I was hiding a
dead person in my fridge.
I was too tired when I got home to do anything but stick the meat in the fridge. So last night, I rolled up my sleeves, pulled out the boning knife, and got ready to remove the fell and
french these suckers when something glorious happened — I opened the bags and they were already beautifully cut into individual servings. All I had to do was separate them into single-person portions to freeze, readying them for easy thawing for the
thousands of yummy lamb dishes I will be trying over the coming weeks.
Toni’s freezer, full of meat (mine’s already full).
I kept a few out for dinner last night at Toni’s. Ana came over and I put the two of them to work on dessert (two Croatians + mistranslation of tsp/Tbsp + makeshift measuring utensils = a brand-new recipe for chocolate chip cookies). In the meantime, I steamed some rice and threw green beans into a pan with butter and almonds, a quick and easy stir-fry-and-steam method that I love when I need to quickly cook some veggies.
Looking tasty.
I heated up the grill pan, added some salt, pepper, and fresh thyme to the chops, and let them cook, about 3-5 minutes a side (I like medium rare, but everyone else likes their meat cooked more thoroughly). Since the oven was heating up for the cookies, I put the lamb in a pan to finish in the oven for a few minutes.
A square meal.
We sat down to eat our very well-balanced meal (Mom taught me well: meat, starch, green) and poured ourselves a glass of South African Sauvignon Blanc… not a traditional pairing, but it went nicely with the meal, as well as with the humidity. While we were eating, we put the cookies into the oven for about ten minutes. I went to check on them and at first thought they hadn’t cooked at all. Then, I realized the bottoms were brown – the extra teaspoons of baking powder had created spongy cakes rather than a crispy cookies. Which was fine, as the plan was to make homemade ice cream sandwiches: their sponginess absorbed the melting ice cream and prevented the cookie from cracking as we bit into them.
Really wishing I had another one of these, right now…
And Toni made me promise not to make him fat…
