the SIMMER blog

what winter means

I love summer, I do, when the farmer's market is bursting with 18 kinds of greens, and all those lovely tomatoes and green beans and fruits that need nothing more than a light rinse under the tap to be enjoyed.

But I also love winter. When you can shove a joint of meat into the oven around noon and it fills the house for hours with a gorgeous, tantalizing, ever-evolving smell, and emerges tender as velvet to be served to a crowd -- right away, or later, or whenever you get around to it.

 
I recently made a leg-of-lamb from the Ad Hoc cookbook, but it was not this one. This one was the seven-hour leg-of-lamb from All About Braising, and it was better than the Ad Hoc version, which is the first time I've ever said that about anything from the Ad Hoc cookbook. I worship the Ad Hoc cookbook. But there's just something about braising the lamb until it falls apart that I like much much better than the kind that takes a shorter turn in the oven.

 
 The seven-hour lamb, as you can see here, is just onions + tomatoes + carrots + time.

 
And time.

(And apparently some fennel I didn't capture in the first shot.)

 
And time.

(Doesn't it look like a Dutch still life or something?)

 
Until the vegetables are soft and the lamb is barely holding itself together and the house smells so good you can barely stand it. Tzatziki, bread, dessert, done.

Winter. It's what's for dinner.

tweeting toward keema

Don't know what keema is? Neither did I until I asked Twitter what I should do with some ground lamb. Thanks, Twitter!

(more specifically, thanks, @marlenaspieler!)

So I Googled around a bit and kind of smushed together a few online recipes' worth of lamb keema approaches, like this one and this and that. I had just about everything I needed, ground lamb and peas and shallots and spices.

Including some spices I don't get around to using that often...

 
Unfortunately browning up ground lamb is so very not photogenic, which is why you'll only get one picture of that stage, thusly:

 
But for more photogenic purposes I would like to point out that the coriander and fennel seeds you can kind of see above were toasted in a dry pan and then cracked/crunched a bit in the much more lovely-to-look-at mortar and pestle pictured below the jump:

 

tapas week: make-ahead or make-after

So here's why even tapas cannot save me from my overdoing self: because the nice thing about tapas is that you make a little bit of everything, and not every dish has to be enough to feed everyone. Except that I still make enough to feed everyone. Or more than that.

Oops.

And so, when making food for parties, it helps to think of smart ways to handle leftovers. And if you foolishly decide to make two pounds of ground lamb into meatballs for people who have already eaten nuts and cheese and ham and endives and chickpeas and dates and chorizo, you should know how to form and freeze a whole bunch of them for later consumption.

The lamb meatball recipe was kind of an accident. I thought I remembered it, when actually what my mind had done was to mash this Nigella recipe for lamb meatballs together with this Jamie Oliver recipe for lamb kofte. And so now, by accident, I have an awesome lamb meatball recipe that's neither one nor the other.

• 2 pounds ground lamb
• 1 cup chopped scallions (including dark green parts)
• 1 cup chopped pistachios
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp semolina (pretty optional, I think)
• 1 tbsp sumac
• 1 tbsp cumin
• 1 tsp allspice

Nigella says to make them "toytown small", which is so Nigella, and I definitely made them on the small side, smaller than the first joint of my thumb. But it's up to you. Making them this small makes them easier to use from the freezer, because a couple minutes in the microwave on defrost gets the chill off them, and then you can just spill them into a hot pan and in three minutes all the work is done. Make sure not to overcook, or they'll get dry. Brown on one side, brown on another, shake around, and dump onto a paper towel to drain. Huzzah.

Here's the pre-work or post-work part. When making oodles of tiny meatballs, here are your steps.