March 22, 2015 Our First Spring Dinner New Recipes Lunch Crab and Clam Chowder Dinner Casserole Roasted Lamb with Juniper berries, Beet Greens Catalan Style and Roasted vegetables

March 22, 2015 Our First Spring Dinner New Recipes Lunch Crab and Clam Chowder Dinner Casserole Roasted Lamb with Juniper berries, Beet Greens Catalan Style and Roasted vegetables

Today was a great day of food.  I was working all day but Suzette gardened (including uncovering two of our covered beds), harvested our first mess of vegetables from the covered bed and cooked two spectacular meals. 

We made lox sandwiches, combining slices of the fresh gravad lax we made a week ago, cream cheese, sweet onions, a fresh Roma tomato that I bought at Sprouts yesterday and capers on German Landsbrodt for breakfast.  Landsbrodt is the closest thing I have found in Albuquerque that is like the old heavy rye breads my parents used to buy at the local delicatessen in Fort Worth, Carshon’s.  I liked it a lot.

Later in the afternoon Suzette decided to make a Crab and Clam chowder with the two ears of fresh corn and potatoes I bought at Sprouts yesterday. She used  a portion of a can of Phillips crab meat and the PPI clam, spaghetti and asparagus dish we cooked on Thursday night with fresh little neck clams from Albertson’s and a bit of butter. The chowder was spectacular, a milk and cream based soup with the freshest ingredients.  I suppose the reason why people love this essentially peasant dish of the Northeast coast is because it combines the freshest of ingredients from the land and sea into a wonderfully refreshing soup. I remember eating it for the first time at Cynthia's house in Arundel, Maine a year and a half ago. My first thought was, Is this it?" because it was such a simple dish, just corn kernels, milk, a few potato cubes, butter and lobster.  Then my second thought was, This is it! as I realized the perfect symmetry of the ingredients and flavors; the combination of the freshest ingredients of the sea and land but it was not the ingredients that made eating the dish a mind altering experience, it was the broth, the combination of fresh milk, the cream from the fresh spring white corn, the fresh butter and the flavor and juices of the sea released from the lobster.  Today's chowder was even more intense because Suzette used the broth from the poached clams and the sea component stood out a bit more.         

Around noon while Suzette was gardening outside I went out for a few minutes and she showed me that the root vegetables had wintered over rather nicely in the covered bed that she uncovered today. We decided to cook root vegetables with the addition of the parsnip and the 1 lb. of lamb I bought at Sprouts yesterday ($4.99/lb. for an Osso Bucco slice, cut across the leg).  We looked in Marcella Hazan’s "The Classic Italian Cookbook" to see if we could find an interesting lamb dish.  In no time at all we found a recipe on page 280 for leg of lamb roasted in a casserole with white wine, juniper berries and rosemary and white wine that looked good..

We still have the bottles of European juniper berries in the form of liquor given to us by La Señora of the house we rented near Laguardia, Spain in the Rioja, three years ago.  We had garlic, rosemary and celery in our garden, so we had all the ingredients. 

Around 5:30 I went for a one hour ride and then showered.  Suzette called to me in the shower and said, "Everything is ready and I am ready to saute the greens".  " I replied, "I will be there in a minute."  When I returned to the kitchen Suzette had everything cooked.  The lamb, the roasted vegetables and she had decided to use the fresh beet greens from the beets she picked in our garden instead of spinach to make one of our favorite dishes, “Spinach, Catalan-style” page 109 in the Tapas a taste of Spain in America cookbook by José Andrés, quickly sautéed spinach with cubed apples, raisins, and toasted pinon nuts.   

the food always looks better in the recipe book picture

The roasted vegetables included fresh turnips, beets, and carrots from our garden plus the parsnip from Sprouts, tossed in Portuguese olive oil we bought at Quinta de Tedo in the Duero Valley of Portugal last spring.  The benefit of using high quality extra virgin olive oil is that the freshness of the vegetables or other ingredients is not obscured by the olive oil because it has no residual flavor to interfere with their natural flavors.

I went to the basement and found a good bottle of Spanish Red Rioja, Montebuena ($10.99 minus 10% for the Mix Six discount at Total Wines). The wine was delicious, smooth, meriting its 90 point rating and worth every penny of the $10.00 I paid for it.  I told Suzette, “I guess we have moved up from $5.00 a bottle Spanish wine to $10.00 a bottle Spanish wine.”

 

 

 a dark but lovely meal

 

We had a fabulous dinner. Everything came together perfectly; the fresh rosemary from the garden, the preserved juniper berries in alcohol from Europe, the preserved roasted garlic from our garden last year that Suzette processed and stored in bottles in the fridge, and the fresh vegetables from our garden, especially the beet greens substituted for the spinach, with the spring lamb, parsnip and potatoes from Sprouts. 

This meal is the early indication that this will be a bountiful summer of food from our garden that Suzette started planting today.  Suzette augmented the soil and turned the top soil and we planted one of the beds in the old garden in which the soil with snow peas and sugar snap peas.  She also began the soil augmentation of one of the raised beds that is till rock hard and of little productivity and yesterday bought squash seeds for it and when its soil has been mixed and cultivated, we will plant squash seeds in it.  We were both very tired as we sat at the dinner table from the couple of days of exercise and work, but Suzette said, “We are very lucky.” 

I was too tired to respond, but now realize what she meant and agree”.  In no special order, we are healthy enough to work and exercise, we have lovely gardens in which we grow food that sustains us and we enjoy sitting in to eat and enjoy the cool night air, we have enough money to buy whatever we need to make our lives enjoyable, such as any healthy delicious ingredients that we do not already raise and we have the skill and the kitchen equipment to make almost any kind of food we want.  Tonight’s Spanish/Italian meal was a good example.

I consider this dinner our official kickoff meal of Spring. Since this is the second day of Spring.

After dinner it was still warm, so we poured the last of the bottle of Montebuena into our glasses, I toasted slices of baguette and I opened a new container of brie from Normandy (Costco) I had been aging in the fridge for the last month and we ate French brie on French baguette and sipped red wine in our back yard and looked at the night sky and enjoyed the first warm evening of the year.

Bon Appétit