What's for dinner?

Tonight, the answer to that question is roast leg of lamb, baked sweet potato and sesame kale.

I remember eating lamb for the first time at my Grandmother Cleo's house. Most people I knew didn't eat lamb, and if they did, it was lamb chops, and they used mint jelly as a garnish. I have no objection to either lamb chops or mint jelly, but that's not how it was done at our house.

Cleo seasoned the leg of lamb with garlic cloves. Using a paring knife, she would poke small holes in the roast, and then slip a peeled garlic clove into the meat. When you sliced the meat, you often would get a sliver of garlic along with it.

On this picture I put little red arrows to show some of the garlic.

Cleo roasted her lamb in the oven, but we chose to smoke ours tonight. After larding with garlic cloves, and salting the roast, we put it in the smoker with some applewood.
We cooked the lamb for 3 hours, to an internal temperature of 145 degrees. It came out looking like this:

It was wonderful. The meat had that lovely red color around the edges you get when it is smoked well, and it was tender and delightful. We have enough leftover slices for sandwiches for 2 for 2 days, and chunks for 2 casserole and/or stir fry meals for 2 people/2 days.

We chose a white sweet potato instead of the usual orange. I thought the white ones were yams, and the orange ones were sweet potatoes, but I looked it up and found out the white sweet is a variety of the orange sweet. Cook's Thesaurus has the best page explaining the difference between sweet potatoes and yams.

The sesame kale was simply torn pieces of kale, with the stem removed, stir fried in about 2 Tablespoons of olive oil with 1 Tablespoon sesame oil added. I let the oil get hot, then threw the greens in. When they were sufficiently wilted, I added about 2 Tablespoons of roasted sesame seeds, and tossed everything together. All in all, a pretty tasty dinner, and fairly healthy. The lamb is not terribly fat, (and because I buy pastured lamb, it should be lower in fat) the oils in the kale are "good oils" and the sweet potatoes have a lower glycemic index than white potatoes.

I think my Grandmother Cleo would have been pleased.

What's for lunch? Ground Meat Sandwich.

As the unofficial Queen of The Land of Carbohydrates, I love sandwiches. To me, lunch just isn't right unless it's something between two pieces of bread. (Lunch can also be pizza, but isn't that just a big open-faced sandwich?) But my decision to eat local has made sandwiches a more difficult proposition than they used to be. My sandwich of choice usually involves some sort of deli sliced meat, a couple of kinds of tasty cheese, plus other stuff. I no longer choose to buy meat from the deli because I don't know how it was raised, leaving me a choice of cheese sandwiches, peanut butter sandwiches, fish sandwiches. They're all good, but I miss a meat sandwich.

While bemoaning the lack of sandwich making material, I remembered something I loved as a child; a sandwich ingredient my grandmother Helen used to make. She would take meat left over from a beef pot roast and put it through the food grinder, along with mayonaise and onion. She called this, aptly enough "ground meat". It made a darn good sandwich.

I decided to adapt her recipe, making some changes to reduce the fat content. I've used it for sandwiches, inside tortillas to make taquitos and quesedillas, and spread on top of pizza dough. It's very versatile, and very yummy. As a sandwich, I like it with pepper jack cheese, slices of onion and spinach instead of lettuce. Made in the food processor, it's more of a meat paste than ground meat.

Ground Meat

1 small (1-2 pounds) beef roast (could also use pork, chicken, lamb...)
3-4 onions, quartered
3-4 cloves garlic, if desired
water

Place everything in the crockpot, cook until very tender. If the meat is very fatty, refrigerate over night to solidify the fat to make it easy to remove.

Remove meat from bones, cut into chunks about the size of an apricot.

Place several chunks of meat in the food processor, along with some of the onion. Add a quarter cup or so of the pot roast juice, and process until the meat is a smooth paste. If needed, add just enough more juice to keep the food processor from binding up- it shouldn't be runny or drippy. Repeat with the rest of the roast. You can also add raw onion to the paste and process it, but I prefer to put a slice of onion on the sandwich. I pack the paste into the small rectangular Zip-Loc or Glad freezer containers and freeze all but one.

Community Food and Slippery Pot Pie

For Chuck and me, February has been a month full of Community Food. First there was the Second Annual Animal Shelter spaghetti dinner, where a $5.00 donation got me a plate of spaghetti, red sauce, 2 meatballs, roll, coleslaw and dessert. The next week a donation of $5.00 each to the local Girl Scouts got us spaghetti, red sauce, LOTS of meatballs, garlic bread and dessert. Last night we had slippery potpie, pepperslaw, some killer home-made bread and dessert at a local church. Wednesday will tie up the month with the County Democrats Jefferson-Jackson dinner, where a $20.00 ticket will get us a trip through a buffet, with political speeches to follow.

I like this kind of community fundraising. The food isn’t always great, but the money goes for a good cause, and it is certainly cheap enough. Since we are relative newcomers to the area (we have lived here for only 10 years) we generally are eating at a table full of people we have not met before, and that is always interesting to me. And in the case of last night’s Slippery Pot Pie, we got a local experience that really was beyond price.

My husband moved here to Central PA a few months before the kids and I did; we stayed in St. Louis to get the house sold. Within a few weeks of arriving, he called to tell me, with awe in his voice, “Wednesday night is Pot Pie night at the Select!”


He went on to say “This pot pie is like nothing you have ever had before; it is SO GOOD!” And from that point until the rest of us got moved to town, my Wednesday night phone call always mentioned pot-pie; either he got there on time and all was good, or he had to work late and when he got arrived he was told "The pot pie is all," meaning there was none left.


Slippery Pot Pie is a Pennsylvania Dutch dish, actually more like a stew than what I grew up calling a pot pie (Something in gravy, in a crust, that my mother bought 5 for a dollar at the grocery store and fed us when she and my dad were going out to dinner.) This Wikipedia article explains why it is called Pot Pie, when it is not in the least pie-like (it is made in a pot, at least.) Slippery Pot Pie can be made with beef, ham, chicken or turkey; last night we had beef. Vegetables are added at the cooks discretion, and what goes in a pot pie is apparently the source of small but fierce skirmishes among little old ladies across South Central PA.

What all Slippery Pot Pies have in common is the noodle, made from flour, fat of some sort, egg and water. The noodles are cut into 1 to 2 inch squares, and slipped into the broth to cook. The resulting stew has thick, doughy noodles in a slightly thickened broth. This recipe is an melding of a recipe from More With Less Cookbook, the recipe my son's mother-in-law shared with me for her pot pie, and my need for garlic and color in my food. The More with Less Cookbook is published by the Herald Press from recipes contributed to the Menonnite Central Committee. I’ve used this cookbook for over 20 years, and have loved it.)

Slippery Pot Pie

1 large chicken, cut into pieces, OR 1.5-2 pounds beef, pork, ham or turkey
2-3 qts water or broth, can use bouillon cubes if desired, too
salt and pepper.

Cook the meat until tender, remove from bones and cut into bite sized pieces
Prepare vegetables and set aside: (all vegetables added at the discretion of the cook, but potatoes seem to be pretty constant)
2-3 potatoes, cubed
1 onion, chopped,
2 stalks celery, chopped
(These next two are my addition, while you might see carrots somewhere, I doubt any local pot pie cook puts garlic in. And as to carrots, it is my experience that most traditional PA Dutch foods tend to be beige in color…)
2-3 carrots, chopped
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped

Pot Pie Dough
2 C all purpose flour
1/4 C water
1 egg
1 Tbsp oil (Can use lard or shortening if you prefer- if so, cut in with knives or a fork)
pinch of salt and pepper

Mix flour and egg together with salt and pepper. While mixing, add the oil to it and then slowly add water. If it becomes sticky add more flour. Form into a ball, let the dough rest a few minutes.

On a floured surface, roll out as thin as possible, cut into 1 to 2 inch squares. I use a pizza cutter.


After cutting, let them lay on the counter, DO NOT stack them up because they will meld into a large lump of dough.
Add the vegetables to the chicken and broth, cook until vegetable are tender, then slip the dough squares into the broth. Cook 5-10 minutes, then serve.


While it seems like this would be the sort of food served in a bowl, around here they eat it on a plate, and last night, garnished with chopped raw onion.

Cheese steak pizza

I once interviewed a foreign exchange student from Sweden for a newspaper article. When I asked her what she missed the most about home, she answered "Pizza", and went on to say "At home we can get anything we want on our pizza. I can get a salmon pizza if I want. Here, you can only get a few things; pepperoni, sausage, onion, like that." While I was surprised to find out that Sweden was apparently on the cutting edge of pizza-making, it did get me started thinking about whether or not I was in a pizza rut. Since then pizza has been a whole different meal at our house. And yes, smoked salmon pizza is delicious!

Cheese steak pizza isn't a huge detour from the typical pizza road, but it isn't the everyday, either. My family likes it because there is no tomato sauce. This one is VERY cheesy, so I make the pizza crust from the everyday bread recipe posted last, hoping against hope that in a fight between the oatmeal in the pizza dough and the cholesterol in the cheese, the oatmeal wins...

Cheese Steak Pizza
Preheat oven to 400 degrees

1/2 pound thinly sliced deli roast beef
1 TBS olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 cup sweet pepper, chopped (Green, red, yellow, orange- the more color the better, I think)
3-4 medium sized brown mushrooms, sliced
4-5 slices American Cheese (yes, the plastic kind)

crust made from 1/2 recipe of Everyday Bread recipe (about 12-14 inch diameter round)
6-8 thin slices strong provolone cheese
1/4-1/2 cup grated mozzerella or packaged Italian Cheese Blend

Cut the roast beef into strips about 1/2 inch wide.
Saute the onion, garlic, pepper and mushroom in the oil for a few minutes, then add the beef. Continue to saute until the onion is slightly soft and starting to turn transparent. Tear the cheese into chunks, add to the mixture and lightly stir until the cheese melts.

Cover the crust with the provolone slices. I like Stella Old World Provolone, and I have the deli slice it fairly thin. Spread the meat and onion mixture over the provolone, cover with the grated cheese. Bake for 15 minutes, or until cheese is well melted. I usually turn the broiler on for the last minute or two to get a nice crusty brown on the cheese.

For an extra kick, add a little hot pepper- a jalapeno or anaheim to the meat and cheese mix. I have also been known to add a few handfuls of fresh spinach to the meat mixture for a different taste. And it's perfectly acceptable to use chicken instead of beef.

Pseudo Greek Food- Gyro Burgers

I went to Greece in 1974 with my sister and my mother, and fell in love with the food. We especially liked the street food- gyros and souvlakia bought along with a Greek lemon flavored soft drink in the agora. When we got back to the US, we found it difficult to get the ingredients to make them at home.




Now, more that 30 years later, feta cheese and pita bread is available in most grocery stores, and Greek salads are on just about every menu.




This burger doesn't have the same tight, small-grained texture of the classic gyro but the flavor is delicious. To approximate that texture, I will sometimes put the meat in the food processor to mix the ingredients. You could also put the meat through a meat grinder again. You can stuff it in a pita, or eat on a bun as shown here.

They are Chuck's Gyro Burgers because my husband, Chuck is particular about how his burger patties are made, so he always does them.

Chuck's Gyro Burger


1 pound bround beef
pound ground lamb
4 oz feta cheese crumbles
2-3 green onions or scallions, chopped small
1-4 garlic cloves, chopped fine (we like a lot of garlic)
1 tablespoon dried Greek oregano.



Mix the ingredients very well, and form into 6 to 8 burgers. Grill and serve with slices of onion, tomato and lettuce if desired. We put mayonaise on these, but if I were putting the patty in a pita, I would dress it with tzitziki sauce.


Tzitziki sauce


1/2 c plain nonfat yogurt
1/4 c cucumber, peeled and chopped fine
lemon juice or vinegar
pinch of salt



Mix together. Spoon over burger.




(By the way, gyro is pronounced Yee row except for here in Central PA, where they are called jEYE rows, like in gyroscope!)



Here's a picture of me, probably on the Acropolis, in March, 1974. Since I don't remember taking any long skirts with me, I am a little scared about those pants! But it was a different time, different fashions....


FYI, buildings on the Acropolis are being threatened by acid rain. The picture below is one of my favorite buildings, the Porch of the Maidens on the Erectheum. According to this article, the caryatids have been replaced by replicas.