Happy holidays! We went to see Hampton’s parents for Christmas and every trip to Raleigh these days requires a trip to Wegman’s for specialty items we rarely see in Winston-Salem. As much as we love this town and don’t want to move back to all that traffic and house prices.
When we go to Wegman’s, we usually come home and immediately (barely) cook a sushi-grade tuna steak and maitake mushrooms. This time, they were out of tuna, and we left the mushrooms in my in-laws’ fridge.
So we got home today and found ourselves with a lot of various proteins, three small Dutch Baby potatoes, the end of a sad bag of kale, some other random canned veg and baby carrots and a jar of pomegranate arils we forgot to take to Raleigh. FTR, we LOVE pom season. I would eat them all year ‘round, but the containers of seeds last, like, two days. Harvesting a whole pomegranate, the seeds last a good three weeks. And FTR, we are big fans of scoring the top and ripping them open under a bowl of water; the seeds sink and the chaff rises — easy peasy!
SO. What to cook. We have new veal cutlets and some spaetzle and pasta in the pantry, but not enough salad stuff for schnitzel or Saltimbocca. We have new ground lamb and could do maybe to meatballs with glazed baby carrots and …pantry farro? We don’t have enough potatoes for mash….
Enter, a super-trimmed lamb rack and this recipe. We could adapt the timing for lamb sans a proper fat cap. And without whole fennel, we could slice the three small potatoes real thin, toss them in some leftover duck fat, and add that end of a bag of kale. The side dish we never knew we needed but will 100% return to as a clean the fridge option, for sure. Or maybe on purpose, it was that dang good.
As I always say: recipes are just guidelines. As much as I love fennel and want to make this recipe with proper lamb, we used up sad potatoes and greens with a trimmed rack and it was a capital Double D Dang Delight.
If you ever need inspiration for what’s on hand, let me know! Playing CHOPPED is my favorite game.