Ok, finally caught up here.
I’m still of the thought that Canal House’s food doesn’t always quite eat as good as it looks in their books, but everything was quite nice, at any rate.
Our Saturday meal was lamb roasted on the bone with a parsley and garlic paste on the inside, some artichokes cooked “Roman style” (e.g., in olive oil, white wine and mint, with all the tough leaves off of them), and a radicchio salad with pancetta and hard-boiled egg. It all went together nicely and it made for a classic spring meal. I do like on the weekend to have a significant roast or braise of a meat that I can then use over the course of the week for sandwiches, fried rice, stir-fry and so on, so this also fit the bill as far as that goes.
Lamb is interesting—it’s often expensive relative to pork and chicken, but at least in some markets, less than beef. Folks I know who are meat-eaters either dislike it or love it, but even if you love it, it’s a more occasional taste, mostly, although in a few cuisines lamb and goat are the consensus meats that avoid religious prohibition. The association with spring is obvious if a bit uncomfortable for some in terms of making eaters think specifically about what they’re eating (a baby sheep), but for pastoralists, this is one of the times to thin the herd to what is sustainable as well as to celebrate the end of winter.
I think the Roman preparation for artichokes might work best with baby artichokes, which have become more widely available in many markets. I like artichoke but to be honest as a chef I find them a nuisance to prepare for cooking, and especially if I have to get the fuzzy choke out prior to cooking and get rid of everything but the tender interior leaves. It’s a lot of sawing and pulling and scooping for a pretty small return. At that point I’d almost just as soon get it down to the hearts and just cook a batch of those. Unlike a lot of vegetables, the parts of the artichoke you don’t eat directly don’t do anything useful at all—they don’t really flavor a broth like this one.
Radicchio is beautiful in a salad and it has the additional virtue of holding up fairly well even after being dressed, so you can come back to it a day or two later if you like. It’s bitter but if you do something to round that out (in this case, the crunch and protein of pancetta and hard-boiled egg) it does fine.
I also roasted some spring onions as per the book, but that was a bit tough to coordinate with the finishing of the lamb, because they need high heat to get a good roasted look.
Last night, I did a second dinner from the book. We started with some crackers that had a greens-and-blue-cheese spread on them. That might have been the best thing in the book. I had to substitute arugula for watercress, which I think works (both are peppery, though watercress is different texturally).
Then I made a foccacia with thin slices of lemon and some rosemary on top. That’s a refreshing taste. I was tempted to put a teeny bit of aleppo pepper or something else with a bit of heat on it, though.
And then finally I did a very simple recipe of skinless boneless chicken thighs cooked with leeks, celery and parsley in chicken broth and white wine with some dumplings dropped in on top for the last ten minutes or so. I love that basic preparation (chicken in broth with dumplings and the leeks in this one worked very well.
So yes, the book certainly passes the test. The recipes also do have the advantage of being quite simple both in terms of the ingredient list and the preparation time. I’ll tackle their newest “big” book soon and we’ll see where they stand with more recent recipes.
Everything was delicious. The highlights for me were the chicken and dumplings, radicchio salad (loved the egg and crunch of he pancetta), and the crackers and spread.