Lamb with Mushroom Wine Reduction, Roasted Parsnips and a Spinach Salad

Doesn’t that look tasty? Well, I hope so cause it sure did taste good. What is it? A seared lamb rack with a mushroom wine reduction, roasted parsnips and a spinach salad. Was it hard you ask? Heck no, simple as pie- wait, pie’s not THAT easy but anyways, you get my drift right? Right. Here’s what I did to make this tidy little meal.
It all started with our friendly neighbourhood taproot the parsnip. I’ve recently been watching a lot of Good Eats again (I’m an avid fan of the AB, I mean Alton Brown) and came across the episode Undercover Veggies. Little did I know I was in store for a lesson on how to hide the ever so healthy parsnip in dishes like muffins, chips and pear/parsnip sauce. Good eats indeed but it did more to remind me of how delicious this root vegetable can be and how often I make the mistake of passing over it for my standby favourites of kale and spinach. Still, the unique taste and texture of parsnips I think really shine under some good old fashioned high temp roasting so I just cut them into pieces of roughly the same mass and rubbed with a little olive oil, salt & pepper in the toaster pan. I turned my toaster oven to about 450 and let them sit in there till they started to get some colour. My attention then turned to making a sauce for my lamb.

Now, I love a good sauce. They can really take a simple dish and elevate to a new plateau of palate pleasing goodness but at the same time, shouldn’t be so strong that they mask your main player. Usually for a pan sauce I sear the meat first then use a deglazing liquid to scrap off and dissolve all the flavourful bits left behind. Sometimes it turns out great, sometimes not so much. I haven’t honestly been having a lot of luck with my pan sauces lately so I wanted to give this one more time, more effort. Luckily for me, I had a pan just begging to be deglazed from this morning’s breakfast of scrambled eggs, popovers and bacon. Sadly, I don’t have a picture to show you what my bacon pan looked like beforehand but trust me, it had a plethora of stuck on bacon-ey goodness just dying to get free. Set my burner up to medium, diced a shallot and added a little oil to lube things up (I had drained all the bacon fat of earlier for bacon-infused vodka). After the shallots got a little translucent and picked up some colour from the stuck on bits I tossed in a liberal amount of hooch (aka my dad’s homemade red wine) and just let it sit on medium-low. Lamb rack off the port bow!
I know what you’re probably thinking, “Lamb rack? This doesn’t sound like a special occasion, what gives Rockefeller?” Well, to be honest, my mom works in a grocery store meat department and even though I live a few hundred kilometers from her she still manages to bring me a treasure trove of frozen meats thus keeping me with a stock pile of lamb racks, bacon, steaks, chicken. Oh, all that glorious glorious meat! Ahem, yes, so you'll have to excuse me if I’m a little spoiled when it comes to meats. I still tried to save the lamb for special occasions but then it just ended up sitting in the freezer so long it turned into something better suited to cobble shoes out of than to cook so I started eating them whenever I feel like it.

Now, I see a lot of fancy applications of lamb out there and trust me, I’ve made a few. The most common appears to be the application of mustard to the tenderloin part of the rack, then a breadcrumb mixture and into the oven it goes. This is all right but is a lot of work to cover up something as marvelous as the taste of good lamb so when I approach my rack, I chose the simple salt & pepper & oil (canola is what I use for high temps like searing) route. After massaging that into the lamb I took a look at my sauce to keep an eye out for reducing to the point of burning, adding more wine if things looked like they were drying out.Back to the lamb searing, I set my trusty cast iron skillet hits the burner set to medium to medium-high heat for a couple minutes to get up to a good temp.

I used to sear at as high of a temperature as possible thinking it would give the best Maillard reaction without bringing my meat too far past rare (or blue rare for cow steaks) but I’ve found that my initial fervor for heat was misguided. At a lower temp for a little less time I produced a far superior crust on the meat which all us steak lovers know is a very good thing. The lamb rack hit the pan with the meatiest side down (or boney side up) for a good 5 to 10 minutes. I didn’t really pay attention to the time, just let it sit for while, almost to wear you start to get anxious because you haven’t poked or prodded or lifted to check on it. Trust your nose, if you can’t smell burning, it’s not burning. At these temps, burning would probably take at least 15 – 20 minutes. I just trust my instincts and flipped when they said, “okaaaaaaaaay, NOW!” and ta-da.A beautiful sear was the reward for my patience. Now, I know the squeamish out there might see that red juice and be thinking blood. It’s not really blood more than just some marrow dissolved into fat. At least, I think that’s basically it, don’t quote me.

After letting the other side cook for about the same time I took the lamb out of the pan and set it in a 350-degree oven. The pan used to sear the meat now had some nice bits stuck to the bottom and a bit of rendered lamb fat which I could have poured out but why waste a good thing? I was thinking that I really wish I had some beef broth, then I could deglaze my pan, mix in the wine reduction and then polish with some butter. Sadly, my pantry was bare and my frozen turkey stock or plain water just wouldn’t cut it. But I did have some mushrooms sitting in the fridge, so I cut a few into eighths and tossed in the pan with a little kosher salt. What’s with the stock to mushrooms mental process? I wanted something meaty to mix in with my sauce’s wine base, sure there’s the lamb but trust me, for a pan sauce nothing adds depth like a little stock. What’s the meatiest thing that’s not meat at all? Well, mushrooms of course. What else can be put in a bun and act like a burger? I use mushrooms as replacement for that umami sensation you get from meat, it’s very similar I think. Still, this may not be a liquid but I think it’s just what I’ll need to balance the sauce out. In went my mushrooms plus a nice heavy pinch of kosher salt. I left these brown in the pan but tried to make sure the bits didn’t burn so I used medium heat and had oil ready to make sure things didn’t get too dry. Looking at my reduction, I had turned it to the lowest setting earlier, I realized I needed a binder of some type, something to take my sauce from watery to rich and velvety. What better thing than the most classic base of any sauce, the roux.

My sauce making is amateurish at best, I really haven’t got them locked up into my repertoire of culinary tools but that’s something I’m looking to change. I’ve got a couple books to help but that’s not important now. To make my roux I just mixed equal parts of room temperature butter and flour then placed them in the pan till they got a little colour. Then, I poured on the wine reduction and all the bits I could manage out of that pan and it came together nicely, well, it looked nice but it tasted flat. All that reduced wine and scraped off bits and it still tasted more like just some meaty water with a little salt. Still, this is the perfect time to meddle with the flavours so first I tried a little sweet vermouth. Why? I dunno, it just felt right at the time and it helped but still, it was missing that meaty punch I was looking for. At least I was starting to taste the mushrooms as it bubbled longer on the stove. I then reached from the HP sauce, something I honestly only own to stir into my caesars (it’s what my favourite brunch spot does). I’m just trying to say, I’m not one of those HP nuts who put it on everything from steaks to ice cream it just felt right. I wanted something pungent in tomato-ey steak-ey Worchester sauce way. So, I guess I could have used ketchup and Worchester but HP was right there. Mmm, getting closer to what I’m looking for but it needs some acidity, far to sweet and savoury right now. Lemon juice? No, too powerful in flavour. Red wine vinegar! No, no, it doesn’t have enough kick, it’ll just water down the sauce. Of course, balsamic vinegar, it’d give a good sour vinegar kick but play mediator between the wine reduction’s flavours and sugars we’ve already brought out. Okay, it’s ready and can just sit on low as I toss together a quick spinach salad.
I managed to get myself to quickly hard boil an egg in the midst of everything else as well as wash a bunch of spinach. I gave it a rough chop just to make it easier to eat and plate, as the leaves seemed really big. The thought had crossed my mind to make my mom’s traditional spinach salad as I did have bacon cooked, clean mushrooms, managed that egg and had an onion already sliced open now just her dressing. Hm, I remember it’s not hard but is a more involved vinaigrette. Do I really want to go look it up? Not really, time it ticking away and I already had to turn the oven off to let my lamb rest before cutting. So, I opted for the Caesar Cardini school of salad dressings aka dress in the bowl. Put in your clean, dry leaves, thinly sliced mushrooms and onions. Pour in enough olive oil to coat, dash of kosher salt and a grind or three of pepper then toss with the best utensil’s you have, clean human hands (your hands, not severed hands). Once as everything is nice and evenly mixed splash on a little red wine vinegar. Easy does it on the vinegar, a little goes a long way. Remember that salad dressings are usually something like 3 or 4 to 1 of vinegar to oil. It’s a shame but I forgot to crumb some bacon on there, damn, I so love bacon.
Now that everything was in order I could finally chop up the rack and plate. When I cut a lamb rack I just hold the bones up and then slide my knife down in between each rib. At the bottom the ribs are usually almost connected so try to pull them apart before you cut into the tenderloin part. This way, you get nice straight cuts down the tenderloin and each rib has little round of loin attached.
Arrange these however you like on the plate, I did little spiral kind of thing using the first chops as a platform for the rest to lay against. Dollop the piping hot sauce on with spoon, use just enough to give it a good coat but make sure it’s not swimming in it. The point is to enhance the lamb, not cover it up. Then add the sides and we’ve got a complete meal. Yum!
I found that this is one of the best sauces I’ve managed in a while, it took a little more tweaking but I think sooner or later I’ll be able to bang off scrumptious sauces with less effort and more precision.

So, that’s what I had for dinner and the thought process of the meal while I threw it together. Hopefully there will be more of these as I try to up my skill in the kitchen. I want to see my improvement so I’m planning to keep track of things here. Maybe you’ll learn along with me, maybe this was as boring as hell. Anyways, here’s to culinary advancement and adventure.

Now laugh and grow fat!
- Alex