I am turning into one of those very infrequent bloggers who start out each entry with an apology for not posting, as though anyone is tearing themselves apart missing me/is checking nineteen times a day and not using an RSS reader/making with the gnashing of teeth and tearing of clothes, so I will skip all that and say that I have been hellishly busy and baskin in the cold relief of brainlessness when I am not. My commute is a nightmare. I am barely cooking. I get about three hours to myself every night (ha, you parents are laughing) and then it starts all over again the next day, and while I am learning very useful things and getting a chance to manage people, none of this is particularly conducive to writing weblog entries or coming up with new recipes or writing other things, like novels, which really needs to happen so I can get rich and buy a bunch of land out in Tennessee or something and never have to work again. Or that’s how it works out in my head, anyway.
We had a cold snap awhile ago, if “cold snap” can be taken to mean “it got below 50 degrees during the day for a few minutes”, and I immediately warped the loom, downloaded a bunch of sock patterns and drove up to Sebastopol for a bunch of apples and apple-related products — and though we’ll be back to warm weather for a couple more months, my autumn-industrial switch has been thrown. I am getting the hell ready for winter, internet, never mind that I live in coastal California and haven’t seen snow in seven years. And that includes a ton of cooking.
Anyway, if you come here for the recipes, you are in luck because Super Bee spent a weekend up here not long ago, and due to our shared interest in sheep, we tried a mutton recipe of my invention. We ate it as the filling in a garlic bread sandwich, which I am not even a little ashamed of, but I made it again later so I could take pictures, and I have to say, it is pretty decent on its own.
Tomatoey mutton stir-fry
- 1 pound ground mutton or lamb (mutton gives a stronger taste)
- 1 6.5-oz jar marinated artichoke hearts
- ΒΌ cup sun-dried tomatoes
- cooking fat (I’ll try to post a tallow-making entry soon)
Cut each of the artichoke hearts in half and reserve half the marinade. Melt the cooking fat in the pan and fry the artichoke hearts with the tomatoes for about three minutes. Crumble the lamb or mutton into the pan and fry until cooked through.
Enjoy with a nice caprese salad.
