September 24, 2012 Dinner – Grilled Lamb chops and Roasted Vegetables and sauteed greens with port vinegar and garlic

Willy’s friends, Joe and Michelle were in town so I went by Costco to gas up and eat a hot dog at lunch and bought two packages of lamb chops.   When I got home around 2:00 I called Suzette and we decided to grill the chops and make roasted root vegetables and greens from our garden, except we did not have carrots at our garden and Suzette had mentioned that she had beautiful carrots in Los Lunas, so I asked her to bring some carrots home.

So when Suzette came home around 5:30 p.m. we went out into the garden and picked kale and turnips and beets.  I then peeled and chopped up two potatoes, an onion, and five or six each of the small beets and turnips from the garden and Suzette threw them into a large pyrex baking dish with garlic cloves and tossed them with olive oil and put them into the oven at 350˚ and baked them for about 45 minutes.

We then stripped the middle of the stalk from the leaves of the beet greens and kale and chopped them into bite sized pieces and while Suzette was grilling the salted and peppered lamb chops, I sautéed the green in a wok with three smashed cloves of garlic and 1 ½ Tbsp. of garlic infused olive oil until they wilted and then added 1/2 tsp. sugar and 1 Tbsp. port vinegar and a dash of salt to the greens. 

I then went to the basement and fetched a bottle of Perrin and Fils’ Les Christins from Appellation Vasqueyras Contrólee (80% Grenache and 20 Syrah from Orange, France).  This is in the Rhone area and I thought it would taste like a Rhone style wine and it did and the lightness of Grenache balanced by the heaviness of the syrah grape made a perfect balance for the grilled lamb chops.

As we were plating up our dishes, Joe and Michelle arrived so we ate together.  The plate were very colorful with the red died vegetables, the chops and the greens.  It was a pleasant and satisfying dinner and not too much food.  We are really enjoying gathering and cooking and eating fresh ingredients from our garden.

We also picked a large yellow squash from the garden and after h vegetables were roasted, we put it into the oven to roast.  After about an hour, we let it cool a bit and then sectioned it with a large knife and the softened inner meat pulled away easily from the hard outer shell.  We put the meat into a 32 oz. yogurt container as a PPI and into the fridge.

Willy arrived from his first day of canvassing for PIRG at 10:30 and heated up a plate of food we saved for him.

Bon Appétit