Spit-fired Lamb, or Hungry Sam Meets Mike Isabella

I have a bit of a backlog of meals to write up, I admit. Before I do, however, I want to briefly share an excellent encounter with (a) roasted lamb. Oh, and with Mike Isabella, the Top Chef contestant, who happened to have made this tasty surprise snack.

I'm really into snacks. That's one reason I frequent farmer's markets -- samples are a form of free snack. There may be no free lunch, but there are free snacks.

So JHK and I were wandering the Dupont Farmer's Market, buying bourbon apple barbecue sauce and wishing there were more free snacks, preferably of ripe peach (soon!). As we rounded a corner, we saw something turning on a spit over coals. Definitely a whole roasting lamb. I knew I was in the right place.

This was confirmed when moments later I realized that by getting in line, I could have some.

Woah. Best. Sample. Ever.

Hopped in line and saw this sign. Bells rang dimly in the murky background of my mind -- Mike Isabella...Zaytinya...I'd heard these names. It wasn't, however, until a passerby mentioned "Top Chef" that it clicked.

I'd heard tell of the wonder, the glory of Zaytinya, the nationally-renowned D.C. area Greek/Mediterranean restaurant made even more famous by the participation of its executive chef in the popular competitive cooking show, Top Chef. Come to think of it, I think I may have even seen some of that season. I don't watch much TV, but given my well-documented interest in cooking as competition, I have a natural attraction to this sort of thing.

Anyways, at the top of the line an assistant handed me a small plate filled with steaming, savory chopped lamb. I made eye contact with Chef Isabella and said, "Looks good." He said, "Hope it tastes good too." Conversation with a famous guy -- check.

Well, Mr. Isabella, I applaud you. Perfectly tender, erupting with flavor, the seasoned lamb was topped with just the right amount of lemony butter and fresh dill, the tanginess of which offset the rich meat. It was a superb combination of flavors, such that the tongue itself seemed to be aware that these flavors were both meant to be (wonderfully and quintessentially Greek) as well as revolutionary. I got a little piece of outer meat, too, which had crisped and darkened in the heat of the fire and had some of the salt-and-pepper rub still clinging to the outside. It was streaked liberally with fat as only a wonderful cut of lamb can be; an hour after breakfast, it was the perfect free snack. Here she is:

Wow. I wish I could have captured it better; as JHK can attest, I was too excited by the goings-on to snap more photos before I finished eating. I almost forgot, but thinking only of my loyal readers, I went back to the cooking tent, quickly introduced myself and Hungry Sam to Chef Isabella, and asked if he would pose for you all.

Here is Mike, winner of the first annual Hungry Sam Memorial Award for Excellence in Improving Hungry Sam's Day Through the Application of Delicious Lamb:

Well done, Mike. Well done.

Matzah Will Not Defeat Me

I am fewer than 24 hours into the annual celebration of Passover (or Pesach, for my fellow Yehudim out there) and I'm already tired of Matzah. I know, I know, what's not to like? Matzah is, you know, crunchy, sometimes...and...stuff.

Ok, Matzah is gross. It's a big, dry, flaky, cracker-thingy that manages to create seemingly ex nihilo a mess no matter how careful you are as you eat it. It looks like cardboard, tastes like nothing, and is apparently somewhat dangerous because of the extent to which it expands in one's stomach. Communion-taking readers: this is the bread that Jesus would have been eating at the last supper (the Host), and let me tell you, what a lousy last supper Matzah must have made. It's pretty much the only unpleasant part of Passover, in my book.

Some people enjoy it, but come on. We call it during the seder (the structured Passover meal and service) the "bread of affliction," and frankly, it tastes like it. I know why we eat it, of course; it's to remind us of the urgency with which we fled Egypt when we were slaves, that we did not have time to allow our bread to rise.

The arguments of those who like Matzah generally rest on the idea that you can improve it with things like cheese, butter, chocolate, etc. I CRY FOUL! That may be true, but EVERY OTHER TYPE OF CRACKER WOULD BE BETTER with those things. (Maybe not Cheez-its.)

So.

What am I to do? Not eat it? No! Now that I've had my Matzah in a ritual context, it's time to exercise my competitive epicurean spirit to find ways that Matzah might enhance a recipe, rather than complement it in a mediocre sort of way. I think I found one. Here goes:

Matzah-Crusted, Herb-Stuffed Chicken

I started with 3 boneless, skinless breasts.

Into each I cut a pocket by inserting an 8 inch-long carving knife into the thickest part of the breast. Meanwhile, I sauteed a diced onion with rosemary, thyme, basil, salt and pepper and used my Magic Bullet blender to crumb 2 sheets of whole wheat Matzah with rosemary and parmesan cheese. After letting the onion cool, I stuffed a third into each of my three pieces of chicken.

Next, I heated olive oil in my oniony skillet and seared the chicken for three minutes a side until golden and crisping. I pulled the breasts off the heat and spread about a tablespoon of dijon mustard onto all the surfaces. After dredging each breast in my Matzah crumb mixture, I returned the chicken to the skillet and put the pan in the oven at 350 degrees for about 18 minutes. When the breasts came out, I transferred them to a plate and made a quick sauce in the pan with the drippings, some chicken stock, and white table wine.

This recipe came out spectacularly. I had been hoping that the flaky, crumbly nature of the Matzah would make for a "breading" that would be both tacky and absorbent and I was right. The crust became crispy and took on the full flavor of the mustard and the rosemary while still staying fully attached to the chicken (a challenge when working with regular bread crumbs). The two step cooking process kept the chicken moist and the meat was filled with flavor from the onion and herb stuffing.

This is not just a keeper but one I intend to make again before the end of Passover; it's good, it's easy, and it's kind of fun, stuffing and dressing and dredging the ingredients. Very physical, it feels like you really make it.

Also I burned myself by grasping the handle of my skillet after it had just come out of the oven. I do this frequently, pretty much every time I use skillets in the oven. Let's hope theres no need to fingerprint me anytime soon. Well, for many reasons, really.

Of Lentils, Leftovers, and My Loathing for Celery

They say never to go grocery shopping hungry. This is doubly important when you're me. I'm a little...impulsive.

I went with a list and everything! I was going to make a Moroccan lentil stew, for which I needed just about all the constituent elements (celery, carrots, lentils, chicken stock, wine, mushrooms). The problem is, being hungry (even for Hungry Sam) I decided to multiply the recipe a few times without REALLY paying attention to, you know, the volume of the finished product.

Which means in addition to making too much (frozen for future meals of course) I also have SO MANY LENTILS left. I tried to find a photograph that would communicate the sheer quantity of lentils I have remaining, but all I could find was this tasteful picture of an Italian Lentil farm. Enjoy:

I also have so much celery. What the hell am I going to do with celery? I hate celery. Any food that cannot sustain you AND gets stuck in your teeth should just go extinct already. I suppose ants-on-a-log are an option, but still. GOD.

For my stew, I used this recipe for inspiration, but I departed from it in three significant ways:

1. Cannellini beans are boring! Go with Garbanzo, Kidney, and Butter beans -- they absorb tons of flavor.
2. The spices, as someone mentioned in the comments, aren't very Moroccan. I went with cumin, turmeric, and cinnamon.
3. THIS IS KEY: instead of cooking the lentils in water, I used equal parts chicken broth and red wine. I don't know why I did this; it was incredible. (VEGGIES -- use vegetable broth)

The celery just sort of melted into the base; I'm never cooking with celery ever again. Forget that. I loved the richness of the mushrooms with the buttery, cinnamony lentils and the diced tomato, which added just the right level of savory tang. I'm always suprised that more people don't cook with cinnamon as a savory spice -- it always seems to lend a sharp, earthy flavor, one reminiscent of sweetness without being itself sweet.

Recipe's a keeper, though I will say it did not keep as well as I would have hoped and I ended up having to throw some out. Bah. Overall though, and despite the several hiccups in the process, a great cooking experience and one I would recommend.

BREAKING NEWS UPDATE: PB&B&J

This is a Breaking News Update from my desk at work: I am eating the most delicious Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich that has ever been or will ever be. It has banana slices. BANANA SLICES.

It's on whole wheat multigrain bread from Trader Joe's, using organic crunchy peanut butter, and jam that our family makes from family-picked strawberries every year. It is amazing and I am ecstatic about it. Here is a picture; I wish I should give you all a bite, but then there would be nothing left for me.

PB&J's are having a bit of Renaissance in my tastes, for whatever reason; I think I've just made peace with Peanut Butter. And Bananas.

A more fully-though-out posting on something that someone else might care about to follow later tonight or tomorrow.

Blessed be Brunch

I will be brief. The exceptionally talented blogger Suburban Sweetheart, my coworker and friend, loves breakfast potatoes. She adores them. They are her everything, in a Barry White sort of way. She ALWAYS gets them with any meal at which they are available, and has only the highest and most discriminating breakfast potato tastes and standards. And her Ideal Potato, in a Platonic sense, is the brunch buffet breakfast potato at the Marriott Crystal Something Hotel.

When she speaks of these potatoes, her head cocks slightly up and to the left. Her whole body tenses slightly, as though she is straining toward the image in her mind's eye. Her brow lifts and her eyes widen and become unfocused, as though directed inward with a Buddha-like concentration. I think she even tears up. She really, really likes these potatoes.

Being Hungry Sam, I've understood her passion in a general sense. But this last weekend, brunching after a hard morning of tikkun olam-ing, I had the glorious opportunity to taste the object of SS's long-unrequited desires. I had the Potatoes.

Please, please, allow me to be more precise. I had the Brunch. I OWNED the Brunch. WE owned the brunch. In the 17 minutes my friends and I had before the buffet closed, we ate nearly every bit of food at the buffet. I personally ate NINE POUNDS of food. See?

That plate is my first of 3. Plus there are more out of frame. And I think I ate a little off my friends' plates, hence my ridiculous expression, which is meant to communicate victual-related victory. Altogether, we enjoyed plate-cracking loads of:

• scrambled eggs
• The POTATOES (2 varieties, both cheesy and non)
• strawberries
• melons
• blackberries
• omelets
• chicken sausages
• pineapple
• waffles
• blintzes
• probably other things, but I forget.

The meal is like a dream; I almost don't believe it happened. So much food, so fast, and just so damn good (which is obviously important; everything was impeccably prepared). The potatoes were everything I'd hoped, everything I'd dreamed, and almost as satisfying as eating them was seeing Suburban Sweetheart doing so herself. This brunch, these potatoes are enough to make me willing to return to the high-rise hell that is Crystal City. And that's saying something.

PS: I'm pretty sure I can make said ridiculously stupendously mouth-wateringly superb potatoes with some minor variations on my recipe.

Well-Balanced Breakfast

Remember how kid's cereal commercials (not the Mom-approved ones; more like Froot Loops et al.) used to end with the assertion that the hydrogenated fat-sugar in focus was somehow part of a well-balanced breakfast? And didn't those well-balanced breakfasts look so freaking good?

Yes, yes they did. It was great! There'd be toast, an egg, orange juice, milk, maybe a sausage, framing the sugar cereal of choice. It wasn't even the food itself that looked good; it was the beauty of their visual and nutritious balance. The effect of surrounding the food being pushed with other delicious but generic foods was immediate and irresistible (like Rudolfo Otto's mysterium tremendum): I would always immediately begin my mother's application process for new sugar cereal (to be completed in triplicate and submitted under a blue moon).

Now, it would be too contrived to imitate such a breakfast (although I do frequently make for myself multi-Act breakfasts balancing protein, fiber, vitamins, etc). BUT every now and again, when Mars aligns with Saturn, Demos, and my toaster oven, a well-balanced breakfast just coalesces before me. Bowl of cereal? Check! Coffee? Yes please! Bananas? SIX FOOT SEVEN FOOT!

This happened last weekend, as my colleagues and I breakfasted at a hotel, gearing up for a long day of social justicing. It looked a little like this:

Well, actually, it looked exactly like this. I got very excited and snapped this shot even though balanced as it might have been, it was not the smorgasbord of fat and sugar from Frosted Flakes commercial's glory. This excitement has translated into a post here at Hungry Sam, and now I'm going to ask for some responses from you, my avid and loyal readers (BANTER!)

What is your well-balanced breakfast? What constituent elements, in joining together, have the Captain Planet-like effect of combining powers into something wholly other and stupendous? You can respond by commenting below (for the superstars among you) or by voting at the right.

Happy breakfast!

Turkey Chili: Habanero Burns Ensue

If this blog makes you in any way I am some sort of cooking "expert," allow me to state unequivocally that I AM NOT. I am the slightly more sophisticated version of a 5 year-old who makes "soup" by stirring at ice cream or lemonade by combining lemons with...nothing.

What I am is enthusiastic. If what I make sounds delicious, that's because a) it is, but more importantly b) because I throw myself into every recipe or opportunity for experimentation with youthful and at times idiotic zest and vigor. I will soon have an EPIC FAIL and will blog about that too, I promise. Like the time I once made chicken biryani and simultaneously invented a new alloy of steel/chicken biryani.

ANYWAYS: My amateur enthusiasm comes out when I least expect it. The other day, while locked in fierce combat with the weather, I made about 2 gallons of Turkey Chili. As per several requests I have had, I will attempt to recreate the recipe (see bottom of the post). The point is, although I had experienced chili burns before, and although I KNEW habaneros (frequently spelled with a tilda over the 'n') are the spiciest chili pepper available in most grocery stores, I did not take proper precautions.

Proper precautions would have included:

1. Using gloves of some sort;
2. Using a wet towel to grip and handle the peppers;
3. NOT USING HABANEROS.

Long story short, about ten minutes after using the peppers, I developed angry red burns on my fingers. This is because the oils in hot chilis include a compound called capsaicin, which is also in tarantula venom and used in the popular muscle pain ameliorate IcyHot.

The oil also got under my finger nails, which I discovered 3 hours (and several handwashes and aloe applications) later when I scratched my neck...and left angry red burns. Wowza.

Anyways, the chili was GREAT. I love to stuff chili with tons of beans, as many varieties as I can find, both for color and flavor. I used about 2.5 lbs. of ground turkey, 93% lean, and simmered it down longer than I needed to achieve a more intense, thicker chili. It's pretty healthy too; I go light on the oil and the turkey is lean. Other than that it's just veggies. Here's the recipe:

Pain-is-weakness Chili (okay, it's not THAT spicy.)

NOTE: ALL amounts are estimations, particularly for spices; I spice to taste and throughout the process.

2.5 lbs. ground turkey, 93% lean
olive oil
2 jalapenos, minced
2 medium onions, chopped
1 bell pepper (I like yellow for the color), chopped
1 habanero...or not. Minced.
2 T. tomato paste
1 can (28 oz.) whole tomatoes, peeled.
Small handful FRESH cilantro, stems separated from fronds
3 c. low-sodium chicken stock
3 T. minced garlic
T. cumin
1 T. cinnamon
1 T. chipotle pepper, ground
1 t. oregano
2 bay leaves
Pretty much as many beans of any variety you choose. I used 5 cans -- butter, black, black-eyed, kidney, and garbanzo. Drain and rinse.
Salt and pepper

1. Heat oil in a dutch oven or other large, thick-bottomed pot (make the cookin' world go round?). Sautee garlic, then peppers, cilantro stems, and onions, seasoning with salt and pepper and some of the spices, until onions are translucent and sweating.
   
2. Throw in the turkey, breaking up big chunks, until cooked through. Spice.
   
3. Stir in tomatoes and paste, then chicken stock. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, cook about 45 minutes. Season and spice at several points -- it's important to remember the character of spices is different depending on the points at which they are added.
   
4. Toss in the beans, cook an additional however long you feel like it (I did 30 minutes more). Add cilantro (fronds?) just before serving.