Nestling lamb chops into pearls of cous cous

After a winter of roasting root vegetables a beautiful spring week lies ahead with promises of balmy nights and sun filled days. A few weeks ago Anthony, our talented chef on the grill, started asking to get some lamb chops back on the menu. We tossed around ideas, some lent themselves to the passing season and we were both craving a light preparation with a cool sauce. Several days went by as we starting to plan where it would fit into the menu, the upcoming weather and the search for a new and interesting ingredient.
When the lamb racks arrived we carefully trimmed and digitally dissected ( i.e. used our fingers, an old phrase I learned from a chef early in my career, thanks Josh) the excess fat away and cleaned the bones also known as “frenching the bone.” Great meat, seasoned simply with salt and pepper then grilled / roasted to a well rested, ruby red medium rare simply speaks for itself. We pulled an old favorite sauce out of our quiver, the traditional Greek tzatziki sauce. No, not the glompy white cucumber flecked creme on your gyro but the bright, cucumber and herb perfumed yogurt meant to cut the richness of the unique flavor of lamb. Finally, we found an ingredient that had yet to make it onto our plates here at Niche the Lebanese cous-cous. Not to be confused with its delicate and much finer cousin, this texture is that of pasta and it’s size is just a bit smaller than a Kix or Cocoa Pebble. I toasted it in olive oil with a good dose of Spanish paprika and cooked it in a roasted red pepper broth until tender and then spread it out onto a sheet pan to cool. As the lamb is resting, asparagus tips are sauteed in olive oil along with the cous-cous before nesting onto the plate to be topped with lamb chops just waiting to be devoured.
After all that, what finally distilled itself onto the menu is the collaboration of a few cooks craving some lamb chops but you’ll just have to taste for yourself! Mouth watering yet? Until next time . . .Chef Jeremy

Sheppard’s Pie Potato Tips

Sheppard’s Pie, the mysterious Irish comfort food, said to be originally from England, will be prepared almost a million different ways over the next couple of days. Like casseroles or “hot dishes” we find on the tables of Americans for decades, each sheppard’s pie has its own familial adjustments to the recipe. Some use ground beef instead of lamb, some with peas and other root vegetables even some with just meat and gravy. One fluffy, golden brown component that is always present is the potato mixture that caps the hearty stew.

No matter what variations to the recipe you have for the stew there are a few tips and things to watch out for that will set your sheppard’s pie apart. Most recipes call for the potatoes to be boiled before mashing.  Cooking the potato properly is the foundation of the topping. If you do like to boil the potatoes don’t forget to add salt to the water and after you drain the potatoes, spread them out onto a buttered baking pan. Put the baking pan into a preheated oven (350 degrees) and bake until the steam no longer comes off the potatoes but before the brown. The excess water will only weigh down the potatoes and where the water was you can now fill it back up with butter and egg yolks.

After drying out the potatoes, put them into a mixer on medium speed, add the butter and egg yolks whisking just to incorporate. If you leave the potatoes in the mixer to long they will begin to get “gluey” and lose their delicate texture. Fold some scallions and herbs into the mix for more flavor and a bit of garnish. Put the somewhat cooled mixture into a pastry bag with a large star tip and pipe onto the top of your stew. Remember that the more surface area you create with the star tip and piping pattern, the crispier the golden brown crust gets.

For the next few nights we are infusing our Winter Tasting Menu with some traditional Irish fare. Tomorrow night we will serve our version of sheppard’s pie to celebrate St. Patrick. To put our unique touch on it, we are gently braising lamb shoulder in broth with cipolinni onions, baby carrots and garlic until if falls apart. The fluffy and golden brown potatoes will crown each individual crock and bake until golden brown. To finish the dish, rather than the peas in the stew we are gently draping sweet pea tendrils. Erin go braugh!   Chef Jeremy

Crispy bits enrobed in velvety gravy

Recently a good friend of mine spent his Sunday mornings perfecting his biscuit and gravy recipe. For weeks he toyed around with different sausages and studied Alton Brown footage to hone the delicate amount of flour needed to bind the milk into a velvety cream. In our regular discussions I explained the finesse of making the gravy including the gentle browning and rendering of the sausage. At just the right time, adding the flour to the sausage which helps to relieve clumping issues when adding the room temperature mil while whisking. And finally the tiniest pinch of nutmeg to round out all of the flavors.

While I have yet to taste a batch of his recipe, I am confident that he has a handle on the gravy but he still uses tube biscuits. Don’t get me wrong fluffy, perfectly layered dough popped and unraveled from a shiny tube is a much better way than frozen or precooked biscuits any day. So many people are intimidated by biscuit baking, leaving it up to machines in a factory; making your own is easer than you think if you keep a couple of things in mind.

The recipe I use for our biscuits and gravy dish at brunch on Sunday morning comes from our crispy, slightly translucent edged and dog ear (from buttery fingers) and dog eared paged copy of the “Joy of Cooking. (click here for the recipe).” I modify the recipe a bit adding 1 tsp of baking soda and substituting buttermilk for the milk and I brush the biscuits with milk instead of butter before baking. I double the batch and precess it in a food processor until the frozen butter bits are about half the size of a pea. The dry component of the recipe works even better after being frozen and you can pull out as many biscuits as you need instead of baking by the dozen. A major shift from the recipe that I use is something that comes with the experience of many batches, some close to perfect and plenty of failures. I start with the dry component in a mixing bowl, a fork and some ice cold buttermilk. I splash in some buttermilk and start to mix with my fork until the clumps begin to get larger.  Set the bowl aside for a few minutes and let the flour absorb the buttermilk. Grab about a three inch ball of the dough and almost turn the bottoms inside the bottom creating a rough , almost spiky surface. those spikes will create crispy little craters that give a delicate crunch after being enrobed in velvety gravy. Brush the tops lightly with milk and bake at 450 degrees until the biscuit comes off the nonstick baking pan and has a subtle thump when tapped.

The only way that I truly enjoy eating biscuits is fresh from the oven (popped from a shiny tube only if desperate). Making them for family and friends is rewarding, but can be a mess. Next time you get the craving, let me make and clean up the mess, drop into Niche, I bake a fresh batch of them every Sunday just before we open.

Organic vs Sustainable Farming

One of the questions that I often hear at farmer’s markets and am frequently asked is if we serve “organic” produce. To respond simply I say that I seek out and serve as many sustainable goods that I can. The terms “organic and sustainable” are both commonly used by food producers and consumers, but is there an advantage to one or even a difference? While both are advantageous, I find that “organic” is a broad term while “sustainable” simply tastes better.

The term organic refers to global food products that are heavily regulated and can be quite costly for the farmer. It often begins with a waiting period to enssure that the land to be farmed is free from chemicals and synthetic materials, often taking up to 3 years. The farmer must then pay to have soila dn water samples taken and studied, complete documentation on farm history, design a plan for future production and be interviewed at an official farm visit. After all of this, the farmer is required to pay an annual fee anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars. With these demands many of the smaller farms that I work with either don’t have or don’t desire to the label of “organic” for their produce, but would rather be known as sustainable.

In the past couple decades a grass roots movement of sustainability has made its way into homes throughout the country. A bill was passed defining sustainability as a system of farming process that enhances the environment, uses little non-renewable resources, produces food that is healthy to eat, financially sustains the farm and most importantly, enhances the quality of life for farmers and society. Most of the farmers that you will see at your local market tend to use these practices and the cost is much lower. They will use age-old farming techniques like integrated pest management and crop rotation to accomplish what technilogy has put into a powder for industrial farms.

All definitions, sociological and political views on the matter aside, to me, sustainable food simply tastes better. Organic farms can be found throughout the world and are often large in scale with extensive shipping. While the transport of foods has come a long way over the past couple decades, the organic carrot you bought at the grocery store was probably grown out west or even on the other side of the equator and harvested some weeks before you are it. Most sustainable farmers at the markets were digging in the dirt just the day before and probably that morning to harvest the carrots. nothing beats the flavor of a carrot just pulled from the earth, still warm from the sun, washed off and eaten raw. Not only does it taste good but its packed with nutrients that lessen with time and most importantly, it makes me feel like I am making a difference for my guests and farmers alike. To me, that is the essence of sustainability.