Some good things we’ve eaten in the last month of two. After Easter we scored some heavily discounted legs of lamb from the supermarket (first time we’ve cooked a leg of lamb since 2008), and slathered it in a Mechouia-style spice mix, inspired by a recipe in Persiana. Some garlic, a lot of paprika and coriander and cumin, some thyme. It was beautiful, but then again, leg of lamb is hard to fuck up as long as you don’t cook it too long.
Lunch time salads are still on heavy rotation. I’ve been topping a lot of ours with coconut flakes tossed in a mix of tamari and sesame oil, and then roasted till golden, stolen from this recipe by Heidi Swanson. It’ll probably also make a pretty good snack.
The bounty of fingerling potatoes that are around also means that we’ve been making a salad of roasted fingerlings and zucchini and peas, dressed with a basil pesto-olive oil-vinegar-thing. Best eaten at room temperature, it travels well and does not feel like a sad packed lunch. It made a particularly good meal on a day I watched Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman with my students, relishing in their frustration at having to watch a woman clean her house for three and a half hours.
It also feels like we’ve been eating our weight in asparagus. (Waiting for someone to make a pee joke.) New favourite thing to make is shallow frying them in a little olive oil and salt, and then tossing them in a dressing of miso, a little garlic, olive oil and rice wine vinegar. I made a pan full the other night, for a dinner party, and they were gone within within the first minute.
And then, finally: barbeque baked beans. First up: I’ve never had a thing for the canned variety – someone once tried to serve them to me on a burger when I was a child, and I just about died. (Also, who the fuck eats baked beans on their burger?) But when I was in Boston I had a scoop of beans prepared by Sweet Cheeks Q (along with some brisket that was an existential epiphany), and now this is all I want to eat. I made a massive pot of beans (it freezes well, and makes for a lovely Sunday night dinner if you don’t want to cook but just sit on the couch and drink beer), and I am amazed at how happy that made me. The recipe is off of Serious Eats, and it’s sufficiently complex even though it really doesn’t take that much active preparation time. I halved the sugar, honey and molasses, and advise anyone else to do so too – even halved it’s quite sweet.
CAKE AND DECAY 