The Start of Something Beautiful...

Saturday evening, we had our first cooking class, Cooking with the Cheap Cuts, Part One, taught by Rich Horbaczewski who is co-owner of Bushel and Peck's and Grass is Greener Gardens. Lamb shanks and an Angus beef roast were the cuts, and Rich prepared them in a traditional Italian Ossobuco style. He cooked and held forth on farming, eating, hunting, and cooking; we watched and listened (and snacked on fresh hummus and tabouleh, chips and veggies). When the sample pot was finished, he unveiled the final product (another version made earlier that day), which we enjoyed with wasabi mashed potatoes (G is G yukon golds), Bob McCabe's ciabatta bread, and jus from the pot. With a sampling of Bandit wine's cabernet savignon, it was the perfect meal to finish up a crisp fall day.

This is the recipe he used from New Italian Recipes.

This meal was an example of one of Rich's convictions that lamb can stand in for veal in most dishes (he's cooking his way through them to prove his point). Lamb is a tender, flavorful meat that retains these characteristics despite being pasture-raised and grass-fed. Veal calves don't have as carefree a life; to keep the meat tender they aren't allowed the wander and graze so the muscles don't toughen up. I won't go into the details much, but if you ever drive past a farm "growing" veal and see these young cows cooped up in their wire mesh cages it will probably make you want to turn to lamb, too.

You're certainly not sacrificing anything. The meat fell of the bones when it came out of the pot, the jus was rich and hearty with no need for thickening and the whole plateful cost (including the spuds and bread) cost about $7.

Here's what else I learned:
-The shank is the leg bone. Rich has his processed so the bone is sliced, and you can see the interior meat (still red because of recent butchering...New Zealand lamb often has red food coloring added to make it look more appealing, as older meat tends to be greyish). Also having the bone cut means more of the marrow will seep into the sauce and make it richer.

-Because of the grass diet, the meat is not as marbled (veins of fat throughout the muscle) and benefits from a longer cooking to keep it moist and tender.

-Owls only eat the head and gullet of chickens when they swoop down in the night and pick off unfortunate stragglers (see what you can learn?). Foxes just drag the poor suckers off into the woods.

Stay tuned, we have two seafood-themed cooking classes coming up in November and a couple of classes that are t.b.a.