Lamb

This is a great date meal for your Lamb Chop, Sweet Pea, or Honey Pie. No need to worry about dessert—you’re it!

I recently ate at a wonderful little bistro in Montreal called Chez L’Epicier, or “house of the grocer.” The menus are written on what look like grocery sacks. Well, supper here was so good, I went out and got a sack of my own groceries to make a 30-Minute Meal knock-off of their gourmet lamb shank served with “raw spaghetti,” which turned out to be pasta with raw sauce. Hey, Montreal is a favorite getaway of mine, but I can make this meal any night I like and my market’s a lot closer!

Lamb chops are always perfect for 30MM because they are quick cooking. If you are the type who only indulges in leg of lamb once a year at holidays, pick up some chops and try this one at home tonight.

You can make this dish again, subbing cubed white or dark meat chicken for the lamb if you have extra spice blend on hand.

The fried asparagus is a perfect use for the thick stalks that you find from time to time in the market.

This simple feast brings together all my favorite flavors from a short, sweet stay in Bordeaux.

A Römertopf, a porous clay pot developed in the 1960s by a German company, is often used in Alsace and southern Germany for long- simmering stews. These stews may be akin to Alsatian baeckeoffe, a pot of meat (usually beef, pork, and veal along with calf or pig feet) mixed with potatoes, marinated in white wine, and cooked in the oven all day long, on Mondays, when the women traditionally do the wash. Agar Lippmann (see page 258) remembers her mother in Alsace making the Sabbath stew in a baeckeoffe, using a mix of flour and water to make a kind of glue to really seal the lid. When I was having lunch at Robert and Evelyne Moos’s house in Annecy, they used a Römertopf to make a similar lamb stew for me. Eveline ceremoniously brought the dish to the table, and in front of all of us, took off the top so that we were enveloped in the steam and aromas of the finished dish.