A Late Saint Paddy's Day Dinner

As yesterday was the Foodie Boyfriend's birthday,

I decided to wait until today to celebrate

Saint Patrick's Day.

In honor of the Irish,

I made a Mustard Herb Roasted Lamb Breast

and Irish Potato Puffballs.

Bacon, Broccoli and Craisin Salad gives us our green.

Tender lamb meat (if you can find it amongst the fat)

is nicely accented by the mustard and herb blend.

I will be making this dish again,

but with a different cut of meat.

Perhaps a nice leg of lamb?

Roasted Leg of Lamb with Rosemary

The Foodie Daughter loves lamb, but hates having to work to find the meat. I was lucky enough to find a half leg of lamb at the store. The next step was to find a suitable recipe.

Fortunately the Internet once again came to the rescue as I found this recipe for Roast Leg of Lamb with Rosemary on allrecipes.com.

Here I have assembled:

The half leg of lamb

1/4 cup honey

2 tablespoons prepared Dijon mustard

2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon lemon zest

3 cloves garlic, minced or grated

1 teaspoon coarse sea salt

I often choose to grate the garlic so that there are not large pieces of garlic in the food.

Now, I would tell you that I decided that upon reading the recipe, I realized that this really did not qualify as a marinade due to the lack of an acid and so I decided to forgo the marinade part of the recipe.

The truth however, is that I neglected to read the recipe the night before, and thus could not marinate the meat overnight.

I do stand by my belief that this really does not qualify as a true marinade though.

I brushed a bit of the glaze on the meat before roasting the leg of lamb in the oven.

Since there was so much honey in the glaze, I added some water to the bottom of the baking dish so that the honey wouldn't burn so badly on the dish.

Unfortunately, it still took some serious elbow grease to clean the dish afterwards.

I ended up having to soak the dish in water with dishwasher detergent in order to loosen the burnt on bits.

The leg of lamb roasted until it reached an internal temperature of 145 degrees.

Make sure that the thermometer does not touch the bone as that would give a false reading.




After allowing the meat to rest under foil for ten minutes, I sliced the roast for dinner.






The remaining glaze was served at the table.



Roasted potatoes and Bacon Broccoli and Craisin Salad accompany the roast.








The leg of lamb was moist, tender and flavorful.

Best of all, there was no need to fight to get to the meat.

The Foodie Daughter was most pleased.

Adventures in Cooking

Once again I recently found myself feeling rather bored with the foods I had been making for my family, so I updated my final will and testament, dug out my parka, donned my protective winter gear and bravely went exploring in the depths of my freezer to see just what sorts of foods I had available to me. A couple of hours, and a moderate case of frost bite later, I emerged victorious with a package of turkey breast cutlets and some pieces of thick-sliced bacon. Now, what to do with this find?

After my fingers had thawed out, I went to my computer and typed "turkey cutlets and bacon" into the friendly search engine and immediately found this intriguing recipe. Deciding that this was enough off the beaten path for me, I decided to give it a whirl.

The ingredients for this fine dish are

bacon

turkey cutlets

ham

mozzarella cheese (since the foodie daughter only likes mozzarella)

fresh basil

garlic

salt

black pepper

First, each cutlet was sprinkled with salt, pepper, chopped basil and minced garlic.

Then a slice of ham and a slice of mozzarella cheese was place on top of each cutlet. The cutlets were then carefully rolled tightly up.

Since I had long slices of thick-cut bacon, I cut each in half and used one slice per cutlet.

The bacon-wrapped cutlets were placed in a baking dish.

The recipe directed me to cover the cutlets with aluminum foil and cook in a preheated 375 degree oven for 25 minutes. However, perhaps since I only had thick-sliced bacon on hand, I believe that this time should have been decreased with the remaining time increased to allow for the bacon to better brown.

As you can see, after the required 25 minutes, the dish is looking rather anemic.

I had to increase the last leg of the cooking time in order to allow the bacon to cook through.

Voila, dinner is served. A rather pathetic canned creamed corn (note to self: make your own next time) and a nice bacon and broccoli craisin salad complete this meal.

This was a nice change of pace from the usual turkey cordon bleu.

And with just a few tweaks and adjustments, I think it will be a stellar dish.

And don't forget my world-famous bacon broccoli craisin salad.