Grilled Lamb Kebabs with Herbs de Provence

In my food post last week I wrote that if spring arrived we’d have grilled lamb, roasted parsnips and a fresh salad. It did and we did. Temperatures all weekend were in the 50’s. Saturday was sunny; and I spent it driving to stores, shopping and preparing haroseth for the Seder we had with the Zamboni family out in Trumansburg. But at the last indoor farmer’s market in Ithaca I bought boneless lamb shoulder from a farm I’d not gone to before. The farmer (I forget the name but will amend that in  the future) had both boneless shoulder and stew meat. When I told him I was going to make kebabs he suggested I buy the stew meat but I declined. I was actually quite thrilled that he had whole shoulder for $7.00 a pound. Butchers up here cut stew meat into inconsistent, often tiny pieces, and do not trim the fat. This makes for a lot of work. I find I tedious trimming dozens of cubes of meat. With the whole shoulder you can trim out some fat (not all! by no means all! Fat bastes the meat as it melts, and gets crunchy and delicious; there is no tastier fat than lamb fat, except maybe pork…or turkey…or duck…or goose…) and cut the cubes to a relatively uniform size. In this case, about 1-1/2 inches. By the way, the melting fat will create an alarming conflagration, so be prepared to move the skewers around. I’ll never forget grilling some big beautiful lamb loin chops at my old house on Yates Street. The fire pit was next to a gorgeous 25 foot high weeping cherry that was a fountain of fuchsia in the spring. I got a nice fire going, put on the chops and ran inside for something. When I got out there was a ten foot flame singeing the weeping cherry!

So I bought about 3 pounds, two shoulders, and trimmed out the big hunks of fat and cut it into 1-2” cubes and marinated it all day in a mixture of herbs, garlic, olive oil and lemon juice. A few years ago Mark Bittman wrote a column about substituting a little lavender for rosemary in lamb recipes, as they do in Provence. In southern France and elsewhere in the Mediterranean lambs graze on wild lavender, thyme and sage. Lavender is a powerful herb with a soapy flavor, so go easy. I picked some dried sage leaves and lavender leaves from the garden, added a little thyme and more rosemary, and this imparted a delicious, herbaceous flavor of spring meadows.  Well, in muddy, clovery Ithaca we don’t have wild thyme in our meadows! But lamb still loves these flavours. With our winter CSA (the last) from Blue Heron Farm we got potatoes and parsnips. I got a spring lettuce mix from them at their farmer’s market booth, as well as a braising mix of spicy/sweet mustards and kales from Muddy Fingers Farm, the first green of the season. And that was our meal: grilled lamb kebabs, roasted parsnips and potatoes, a fresh salad, and grilled leeks and mushrooms.

Grilled Lamb Kebabs

About 3 pounds of lamb shoulder or leg, cut into 1-1/2” cubes

Salt and pepper to taste

Juice of 3 lemons

¼ cup olive oil

¼ cup chopped garlic

1 t copped lavender leaves

2 t crumbled sage

2 t rosemary leaves (more if fresh)

Toss the meat with salt and pepper, mix marinade ingredients and toss, let rest in a bowl for 4-6 hours in a cool place. About an hour before you are going to serve the meat thread it onto skewers. Heat a grill for 15 minutes and then grill the meat, switching between the hot and cooler parts of the grill, for about 20-25 minutes. As the fat melts it will catch on fire, so mind the grill. I closed it for much of the time. You can skewer vegetables with the meat or grill them separately as I did. Baste the meat as it cooks. This isn’t rocket science. It’s good pink, it’s good well done.

Roasted Potatoes and Parsnips

Peel the parsnips. Mine were jumbos. Cut it into wedges, about 1-1/2 to 2”. Cut up potatoes into similar sized wedges. Toss with salt and then olive oil. Spread on a baking sheet, narrow side of the wedge uip and sprinkle with rosemary leaves. Roast for 45 minutes in a 425 degree oven.

This is good with rose on a hot day, or any decent red wine. You could also drink a local Riesling.