Soul and Tender Loving Care with Lamb Shanks & Cauliflower

“A recipe has no soul. You, as the cook, must bring soul to the recipe.” ~Thomas Keller

I agree with Chef Keller. You must bring soul, some attention, and some tender loving care, if you will, to most good recipes.

You need to add those extra touches: leaving the eggs out at room temperature perhaps, making sure you have the best butter available, roasting a head of garlic so you can add its sticky goodness to whatever bread or side dish you may be eating, …the list goes on and on.

And then you must pay attention. You must braise, or stir, or hang out in the kitchen with a glass of wine to make sure that everything is just as it should be. You bring the soul and the love, and then let the food bring you its tender goodness.

Tender Loving Care

Tender. Both of the recipes below, if made correctly, will be oh, so tender. I can’t wait to taste and see how tender my loving care will make them.

Perhaps all of the Cook the 40 recipes require tender loving care, but not all of them are cooked in a way to make the meals themselves so tender. That will definitely be the objective with these next two.

Photo of the magazine cover. — Best-ever recipes? Let’s see how the next two measure up.

Cook the 40

Why take on Food & Wine’s best-ever recipes from their forty years in publication? Well, after making the first nine recipes (featured in earlier blog posts), I will admit that the magazine knows what it’s doing.

I was truly looking forward to making the next two recipes, and especially so as they would be the feature of our Easter—and Game of Thrones—supper celebration!

40 Years of Food & Wine

According to the September 2018 anniversary issue of Food & Wine, and editor Hunter Lewis, https://twitter.com/notesfromacook?lang=en, what makes a good recipe is it being delicious, of course, and (I think even more important sometimes) the best recipes “tell a story worth repeating.” Well said, Hunter.

I am not sure what kind of stories these 40 best-ever recipes will tell from my kitchen’s point of view, but I am excited to find out.

Jeremiah Tower’s Garlicky Braised Lamb Shanks with Sweet Peppers, aka the best-ever recipe from one of the magazine’s issues in 1986.

Recipe Ten: Garlicky Braised Lamb Shanks with Sweet Peppers

How exciting to make a recipe by legendary chef, Jeremiah Tower!

According to the article above, Chef Tower “has been called the father of California cuisine, both as the chef at Chez Panisse in the 1970’s, then at his own magnificent San Francisco restaurant, Stars, where this lamb shank dish was first served. Rich, mellow, saucy, and supremely satisfying, it was a dish that caught diners’ eyes as it passed by their tables, inspiring them to immediately order it for themselves.”

Wow! I couldn’t wait.

The ingredients for this lamb shank dish were not too daunting, albeit not all seen here in this prep photo: lamb foreshanks, kosher salt, black pepper, unsalted butter, unpeeled and peeled garlic cloves, fresh bay leaves, thyme sprigs, chicken stock, red bell pepper, yellow bell pepper and fresh thyme leaves.

Chef Tower advised to use a heavy ovenproof dutch oven for this recipe. Check!
Next up: Heat butter in the dutch oven, add the salted and peppered foreshanks to brown, along with the unpeeled garlic cloves, bay leaves and thyme sprigs.

After the shanks are browned on the stovetop, cover and add to an already warm oven, flipping the lamb shanks every 20 minutes for about 2 hours, or until very tender.
(Note: your oven may not include already roasting tomatoes, but mine did…)

Before this step, the lamb shanks were removed after 2 hours, chicken stock was added and brought to a boil, scraping up all the good brown bits, skimming the fat, and then reduced to about 2 cups of stock. The stock was then drained and saved, to remove the solids, and then added to a wiped-dry dutch oven where garlic cloves were also added for about 20 minutes. The lamb shanks were then put in once again (seen here) along with the bell pepper slices. It was then cooked for another 10 minutes.

The amazing result was this oh, so tender lamb shank (the bone easily slid out) topped with tender peppers and garlic cloves. Wow, was I right! It was more tender than actual loving care maybe, but the TLC made all the difference. Bravo, Chef Tower!
(Chef Jeremiah Tower, my new follower on Instagram, by the way!!! Even if he only follows me for a moment, I’m going to bask in the glow of us following each other. XOXOXO)

What Was I Doing in 1986? What Did I Eat? Where Did I Go?

I turned 16 years old in 1986, so I didn’t do much other than go to high school, and eat whatever my parents made, or whatever they served in the Harlandale High School cafeteria.

A few exceptions? That summer we did travel up to St. Louis, Missouri to spend three weeks with my maternal grandparents, and my great-grandmother Margaret in Pacific.

I’ve written about Pacific in an earlier Cook the 40 blog post, but no such food stories here. I don’t recall any memorable meals that summer, but I’m sure I ate well. I usually did.

As of 1986, we had also been back home in San Antonio for two years, so I no doubt ate many great meals at my paternal grandmother’s house, as well as a few trips to Red Lobster, Luby’s and Bill Miller BBQ. Those places were some of my grandmother’s favorites, and I still think of her whenever I have a slice of lemon meringue pie from Bill Miller or anything from Luby’s cafeteria style restaurants.

I would love to go back to 1986 one more time to spend an afternoon with my Wela, going shopping, or even to Sunday Mass with her, just to be able to sit in a booth at Red Lobster afterward, and talk about anything and everything under the sun.

1986 was a pretty good year.

My beautiful grandmother, Sara Estela Martinez. I spent a lot of time with her in 1986, and the next several years that followed. We talked over many a meal and table setting.

Recipe Eleven: Miznon’s Whole Roasted Cauliflower

No lie, I had been seeing this recipe all over social media in the last few years. Cauliflower? Yep, cauliflower. Because, well, you can already see from the photo below, this is no ordinary cauliflower recipe.

My eleventh recipe is the last one featured in the Cook the 40 Best-Ever issue, as it’s the entry from 2018.

Why all the hoopla?

According to Food & Wine, Eyal Shani, the famed Israeli chef, may be the sole person responsible for its fame.

“You’ll find the ‘The Original World-Famous Baby Cauliflower’ on the menu at all 14 of his restaurants around the world, from Tel Aviv to Paris, Vienna, and Melbourne, and, with the January opening of his celebrated fast-casual spot Miznon, now in New York City.”

And so I bring you Miznon’s Whole Roasted Cauliflower, a la Elda’s kitchen.

P.S. Not gonna lie, I was a bit nervous that I’d screw this up, and had other vegetables awaiting should this not go as planned.

Not too complicated, right? Just boiled water, a whole head of cauliflower, salt and good quality extra-virgin olive oil.
Easy peasy…
Let’s see.

A big pot of boiling water, along with large grain sea salt. I didn’t use sel gris, but this salt worked out well.

Once the cauliflower boiled for 12 minutes (until tender), it sat out to dry and then was rubbed with a tablespoon of olive oil before being put in the oven. The recipe called for the cauliflower to roast in the oven for 25 minutes, but I pulled mine out after about 18 minutes, and I’m glad I did as the result was the perfectly delicious specimen below.
(It would have burned had I kept it in longer. Each oven is its own temperature master.)

Once roasted and removed from the oven, I added the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil and then we devoured! This was so tender and so delicious. Seriously, the inside was soft and so tender that it really just fell apart. TLC or temperature? Whatever it was, this ended up being the perfect side to the braised lamb shanks.

Oh, The Places I Went in 2018!

2018? Where didn’t I go and what didn’t I do or eat?!

In 2018, I ate lots of lamb and pretty much liked it for the first time; I ate horse, and whale, and puffin, and fermented shark; I ate a ton of cheese and chocolate, and, did I mention all of the great beer I drank across three foreign countries?! AND, I poured my own pint at St. James Gate in Dublin and I made pizza cake. Pizza cake.. BUCKET LIST GOLDEN MOMENTS, y’all!

Seriously, though. 2018 was the year of my 52 Things–where I did 52 things I had never done before (which yes did include pizza cake)—and besides some little trips here or there, I took three international vacations: Ireland in April, Iceland in July and Switzerland in December.

Hashtag chiflada. (Or #chiflada)

Look it up.

And then take a look at a few of my international smiles and some of the best new dishes I tried around the globe:

April 2018: I’m always happiest with a pint of Guinness.
Oh, and with Peter, too. XO

Bangers & Mash in Dublin. The best potatoes in the world can be found in Ireland.
In case you didn’t know.

July 2018: Having too much fun at one of the art museums in Iceland.

Plokkfiskur. My new favorite dish that I fell in love with twice in Reykjavik.

This Swiss Rösti in Appenzell, Switzerland was one of the best meals I ate all year.
And that’s saying something!

December 2018: Having a good time con mi amor in Switzerland.

Love Me Tender

As good as walking down the memory lane that was what I ate and drank in 2018, the meal below ranks right up there.

Between the tender lamb shanks, and the just as tender cauliflower, this Easter dinner—along with the Dornish red (shout out to my Game of Thrones peeps out there!)—had enough soul and tender loving care that any chef anywhere would have been proud to partake.

But this tender meal was all mine.

Cheers!

Elda XO