Mediterranean Feast - Lamb and Couscous

Yes I know I have a lamb addiction but I can't help it. It's just that good. And with any new thing I come across I have to share it with Dad. So he and I did guy night again, but this time with a Mediterranean theme. Grilled French Cut Lamb Chops on top of a bed of Couscous. I cannot come close to expressing in words how good this stuff is but hopefully my words and a few pics will help convey the message...

To start I picked up two packages of French Cut Rib Racks from the local Sam's:

Each package contains two half racks:

I was looking at the skin along the meaty side of the racks and thought it looked like silver skin from a loin which is very tough. I decided to remove it from one of them to see if it made a difference:

Don't worry about this. It made no difference at all. Skip this part.

I did two different marinades - red wine/honey mustard/fresh rosemary and basil pesto/garlic - as I have done before to see which one Dad liked better. The ingredients for both marinades are below:

For the red wine/rosemary marinade I combined:

1 half cup of honey mustard
1 quarter cup of red wine
2 teaspoons of rough chopped fresh rosemary (You can use dried rosemary but use less as dried herbs are more potent than fresh herbs)
1 tablespoon of minced garlic
3 turns of a pepper grinder

If marinating more or less lamb just keep the mustard to wine ratio at 2:1. You can add more or less rosemary or garlic as you feel appropriate according to your taste.

Since I let my rosemary bush die (sad) I had to buy some from the store. I'm not someone who stresses about organic products but it was all they had that was fresh. As you can see below the rosemary was quite woody so the stem could not be used for this:

Peal the leaves off:

After a quick rough chop the rosemary is ready for the marinade:

Now combine the rosemary with the mustard/red wine/garlic concoction and whisk or fork to mix well. I realize the color and consistency of this is not the most appetizing, but have a little faith and you will be blown away:

The other marinade was simply enough of the pre-made pesto to coat each side of each half rack and a teaspoon of garlic per side per rack as well. I ran out of gallon ziplocks so I had to marinade those two separately. Place the lamb in the bag, spoon in the garlic and pesto to each side, close ziplock and smoosh (yes, that's a technical term) the pesto around to get complete coverage. The mustard marinade is much less dense and will coat much easier:

Put these in the fridge for a few hours up to 24 hours. These were done overnight.

The next day I pulled the lamb from the fridge and let them come up to temp in the kitchen while I prepped the grill and lit the charcoal:

While the charcoal was lighting Dad and I were partaking in a little vino. Rombauer merlot for during the meal as lamb is not a very overpowering meat and neither is merlot in terms of wine so they pair nicely together. We got into the Water Wheel Shiraz after dinner during the Dark Knight but did not finish it. That stuff is stellar but maybe a little too bold for Lamb. Oh, and both bottles were provided by Pappy:

Again, two zone cooking, coals on the left nothing on the right. Normally when I do lamb I put the fat part of the lamb rack over the heat with the skinnier part (closer to the bones) towards the edge so that the skinny part does not overcook. Well, as you can see below I did not have enough room on my Weber for that so the thickest one went right over the coals with the other three conforming to my usual method:

As you can see below the one right over the heat cooked the fastest and was flipped first:

In order to keep the heat away from the thinner part of the rack I propped the meat up against the other rack with the mustard/red wine marinade:

All I'm looking for is a nice char to the lamb. The lamb will not be finished over the high heat. I want to caramelize and char those amazing marinades onto the outside of the meat.

The two marinades provide two little snags when cooking due to their nature. The honey mustard marinade has a lot of sugar in it so it will blacken more quickly than the pesto marinade. A little blackening is OK. Just be mindful not to let it burn.

The pesto marinade represents its own problem. It has a lot of oil in it and can easily cause flare ups in the charcoal so you need to keep an eye on it and rearrange accordingly so that the pesto marinated lamb does not burn.

Once all 4 racks have a nice char Ipulled them from the heat and put them on the side with no coals. If one half rack is nicely charred, then pull it to the side while the rest get to that point. This does not have to happen all at once.

Make sure to put your largest racks to the outside, closest to the heat, and close the lid:

They baked about 250-275 for about 15 minutes. Since they were touching they insulated each other. If I were doing just two half racks and had room for them to be apart I probably would've only needed about 10 minutes.

In the mean time, time to make the couscous. First off, couscous is a grain. Do not look for it in the pasta aisle as I did. It's with the rice. Pine nuts are in the baking aisle with the other nuts.

Ingredients:

1 ten ounce box of regular couscous
1 three ounce package of pine nuts (could use two of these if you really like pine nuts)
1 32 ounce container of chicken stock
1 tablespoon of minced garlic
Couple turns of black pepper

Put a little olive oil in a pot over medium heat. Put in the pine nuts:

As the nuts start to brown add the garlic, shaking the pot periodically to rotate the nuts so they don't burn:

Once 1/2 to 3/4 of the pine nuts are browned add the chicken stock. If you wait any longer you risk burning some of them. Bring to a boil:

Once it comes to a boil, stir in the couscous:

Remove from heat and cover. Every couple of minutes stir up the mixture. In around 5 minutes the stock will be completely absorbed. Remove the lid, stir up again a couple of times to fluff and it is ready to serve. At this point I put the lid back on to keep warm until my lamb was ready.

And here is that lamb inside resting for about 5 minutes:

Here we have it plated on a large scoop of couscous:

Dad preferred the pesto marinade just slightly over the honey mustard. I'm the opposite. Wanna know how much he liked it? He cooked it for mom about 3 days later. This stuff is a sure fire home run.

I realize that french cut lamb rib racks are not cheap. These ran about $10 per half rack. But if you have a special occasion and want something that is low risk with very high reward I highly recommend this...

Click here for the rest of the process

Filet Mignion that almost wasn't - Many videos of the process

Grilling is not a science. Some may call it an art. But one thing is for sure, sometimes things don't go as planned and improvisation is required. This was one of those times. The conditions outside were not ideal for grilling. 40 degrees and the wind was blowing strong. Keeping a grill at the proper temp can be tough in a situation like that. Normally with a Filet Mignon like this I would sear on each side for 2 minutes and bake for another 3-4 minutes on the side with no coals. The conditions this night changed that time frame and the method pretty dramatically. Click below to get the details.


But first let's start from the beginning. For this session I cooked a very nice size Filet Mignon. Stopped by John's Butcher Shoppee off 270 and St. Charles Rock Road and was delighted to find that they had Filets on sale for $8/pound. This bad boy on cost me $8.31:

Yeah, that is a new cell phone for reference. The old Razr is no where to be found.

While at John's I picked up some of their Marinade:

I am a bit partial to Andria's (something John's carries) but I decided to give their "marinade & flavorizer" a go... Here are the ingredients for their marinade:

The main reason I decided to give this a shot is when I saw the Sodium in this and the Sodium in Andrias. Andrias has almost 3 times the sodium John's does. And I have to say I'm happy I bought the marinade. It was really good. Can't wait to have it on something that is marinaded overnight such as the Bison Steaks I'm doing on Friday.

I threw the Filet into a ziplock with some garlic, black pepper, olive oil and the marinade and put it in the fridge for about 90 minutes:

The reason I used oil instead of my usual cola is because I don't want to ternderize the steak anymore than it already is. For tender cuts you want to go more towards oil based marinades rather than acid based marinades.

After 90 minutes or so I pulled it from the fridge and let it come to room temperature on the counter. You can see how the red steak has browned a bit by pulling in the marinade from the bag into the steak:

Time to find the proper wine pairing with my steak. Rosemount Shiraz should do the trick nicely:

This was the bottle that started it all. Different Vintage, but it was about 10 years ago that I was at a house warmin party and someone walked in with a 1998 Rosemount Shiraz. The guy said, "I realize it is Australian but go ahead and try it. It's great." Now at the time I thought of Australians and wine about the way I felt about the French and cars. Despite that I tried that wine and it was incredible. Turned out that 1998 was the best year Australia has ever had in recent history and they were churning out fantastic wines. I was buying it and giving bottles away to people. And thus began the shift in my family from a bunch of beer drinkers to wine drinkers.

Now out to the grill. With more than a few people mentioning how dark some of my outside shots are I attempted to rectify that with a 500 wat Halogen light. Seems to have worked better than the mag light I held under my arm for the last video I shot!?!?!

And here we have a grill set up for two zone grilling. Coals flaming hot on the left, nothing on the right. Oh, and as I always do just before I grill, I give the grate a good cleaning.

Now to those videos I promises in the title. This is me searing the Filet on one side. For some reason in this video it looks like the flames are hitting me in the face. Trust me, that didn't happen:

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And here we have me searing the other side of the steak:



How do I tell if a steak is done? By feel. I push on the steak. The harder it is the more done it is. As you can see in this video, after a full 5 minutes the Filet was just not cooking. The wind was whicking the heat away too fast so I put the steak closer to the coals:



I pushed it closer to the coals and cooked it 2 minutes on each side and it was still way too spongy so I had to transfer it to right over the coals if I wanted the thing to be more than raw. So much for those beautiful grill marks. Time to form a nice tasty crust:



One little trick here. I needed to get air to the coals to keep them hot but keep the heat in and around the steak. To do so I just cracked the lid a bit as seen here. Some would say that with a weber I just would need to open the bottom vents, except I hadn't dumped the ash in a while and those vents were under a couple inches of ash and not much use:



And here we have the steak on the plate and ready to rest for a little while. As you can see in this video that the steak is much firmer than it was when I was testing the doneness after 5 minutes of baking on the side of the grill:



I let this guy rest for about 4 minutes under foil while I got the movie ready for the evening:


With Pitchers and Catchers arriving in Jupiter tomorrow I felt a baseball movie was in order. Sure half the movie is a chick flick but it's still a great baseball movie:

Same ritual every year. In the weeks leading up to opening day I run the gamut of my baseball flicks including Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, the Natural, and For the Love of the Game. And no, I am not some Kevin Costner nut. The only other move I own that he is in is Silverado, but he makes great baseball movies. Back to the steak


Here we have the Money Shot:


And a bonus money shot of an awesome, tender, and juicy bite:



Click here for the rest of the process

First Guy Night of the New Year + Video of Flame Searing Steaks!!!

Dad and I got together for Guy Night on January 9th. He brought the wine, I provided the steaks and potatoes and he also came through with a nice little bag of Royal Red Shrimps from the Gulf. Every year my folks go down to the Gulf of Mexico and pick up a cooler full of Royal Reds right from the dock, remove the heads and straight into the freezer. They are phenomenal. They have more flavor than your standard shrimps. So surf and turf (and spuds) it was.


Let's get to the ingredients for this meal. First off, a couple of fat New York Strips. Here they are coming up to room temp. Never cook cold steaks. I don't know the science behind it but I always cook my steaks at room temp:

Before I cooked them I wanted to try out the branding iron my 8 month old son got me for Christmas. I think my wonderful wife had something to do with helping him order it but I hear it was all his idea. And I must say it is really cool. At least when using a cut of meat big enough to accommodate the entire brand and these two bad boys did so nicely:

I was able to brand both without having to reheat the brand. Totally cool!!!

But before we get to the cooking of the steaks, including video of the searing both steaks, I should go over the sides. Two of the easiest sides you will ever make - Roasted Potatoes and Grilled Shrimps.

I took about five red potatoes and chopped them into similar sized chunks in order to ensure they cook evenly:

Then simply add some garlic, a good size pinch of salt, a few cranks of black pepper and drizzle in the veggie oil of your choice (in this case Olive Oil). If you want to add some herbs or red pepper flakes or anything else you feel like, go for it. For these I used some dried oregano. No reason other than the jar was the closest to me. If you want to use infused oils like garlic oil or hot pepper oil, that would work too. Here we have the potatoes with all the ingredients waiting for a spoon to mix the ingredients through:


I let the potatoes marinate in the oil/garlic/pepper/oregano for about 15 minutes. Then I preheated the oven to 400 and spread the potatoes out on a cookie sheet:


In the oven for 45 minutes at 400 and then about another five minutes under the broiler and we have nicely golden roasted potatoes:


As soon as I put the potatoes in the oven I lit the paper under my chimney starter while dad got to work on these beauties:


After he shelled and deveined the shrimps we were ready to dump the coals and throw our steaks on:



But first the wine. Again dad came through with an amazing wine. Dead Letter Office Shiraz:



With the coals dumped it was time to do some searing. Same story as all my other steaks. Two zone grilling with coals on one side and nothing on the other. Pour some oil, sear on the flames, rotate for the grill marks if you wish, pour more oil, flip over, repeat. Pull to the side to bake. Before we get to the video, let me show a valuable piece of equipment that I use every time I make steaks. It's a long bottle for oil that allows me to hold the base of the bottle and not burn myself when I pour the oil. Smaller bottles will put your hand right over where the flames are about to erupt from your grill. The wine bottle is there for size perspective:


***ALSO, BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN FLAME SEARING A STEAK, PARTICULARLY IN THE WIND. AVOID DOING SO AROUND WOOD OR SIDING. YOU MAY WANT TO KEEP SOMETHING NEARBY TO PUT OUT A FIRE SHOULD IT GET OUT OF CONTROL.

Now that that is out of the way back to the grillin. My dad likes his steak a little more done than I like mine so his went on first. Here is the video of the process. Forgive me for the low lighting, I am by no means any good with a camera for still or for video:



Flipped dad's over and repeated the process:



Here is a shot of this steak pulled off the heat and off to the side to be baked for a few minutes. How bout the cross hatching? This is not normally a priority for me, but I wanted to show how it is done:


Here is the other side with the Brand. Oh, how I love this new toy!!!


I baked Dad's steak for maybe 4-5 minutes before putting mine on. When mine bakes for a couple of minutes it will give Dad's about 6-7 minutes total baking time and thus a nice medium rare that he likes.

I noticed when doing Dad's steak that the oil poured on the fire that was upwind from the steak did not really have any impact on the steak as the wind blew it away from the steak. So when I did mine, I poured the oil in a tighter spot rather than in a large circle and put the steak on the grill a little upwind from where I poured the oil so the wind would blow the flames into the steak. This will make the oil last longer thus you will use less. You can see the oil lasted much longer in this vid:



I only showed the searing of one side of my steak. After three videos of the process I think you get the idea.

After baking mine a couple of minutes following the searing I pulled both off to rest:


Dad is a big fan of foiling the steaks while resting. I've never done it but we went with it this time. You don't need to seal it tight, it just helps retain some of the heat while resting as well as the moisture:


While the steaks were resting the shrimp went on. Since I was having so much fun with the flame searing I went ahead and flamed them as well. You can see that I am using a grill pan which will save me a lot of time instead of having to manage 15 or so shrimps at one time:


Time to bring this meal together. Here we have Dad's plated:

And here we have mine:


I suppose you want the money shot now. Well in this post you get two for the price of one. Here is Dad's:



And here is mine:



Total time from start to finish to make this meal, 60 minutes. Now on to the movie:


I almost forgot. Dad and I did it up right this time with a little dessert wine with the movie. Old Benson's Tawny Port. Here is a pic of this nectar of the gods!!!


I looked at this pic and it looks like Dad and I cracked a second bottle of wine. For those of you who are not familiar with Port, I feel another picture is necessary to get some perspective on what Port is all about:


That bottle is not a full size bottle and neither is the glass. But a pic with just the two of them looks like they are both normal size. One drinks port in 1.5-2 ounce increments. I like to explain Port with this analogy. Wine is to Port as Coffee is to Espresso. Port and Espresso are both more concentrated versions of wine and coffee, respectively. Port is thicker than wine and sweeter than wine. Incredible stuff.

Click here for the rest of the process