In the spirit of manly food, which should be hearty and nourishing, I’d like to offer a lamb chop recipe I came up with after developing a taste for the kebab sold by Turks on the streets of Beijing. The kebab I came to love, known to the Chinese as yangrouchuan (lamb on a stick), is roasted on bamboo sticks over a long, rectangular barbecue getup, usually fashioned from sheet metal as far as I could tell. The Turks would have a number of sticks of raw lamb in an icebox, as well as some sticks of chicken, including giblets (I liked the chicken gizzards, and ate them for a change of pace from time to time), and the customer would order some five or six of them, upon which they would be thrown on the grill right there on the sidewalk. The cook would fan the coals with a piece of cardboard while deftly turning the sticks this way or that, sprinkling salt and a mysterious spice on them. I had no idea what this spice was, but it certainly made the lamb tasty. In addition to the spice, powdered hot pepper could be thrown upon the lamb to spice it up.
Yanjing beer and yangrouchuar -- a good night in Beijing
After returning to America, I tried hard to find out what this mysterious spice was, finally obtaining a packet from a friend from Beijing when he came to visit. I still didn’t know exactly what was in the packet, but managed to reverse engineer it, add my own twist, and come up with a concoction that did the job quite well. I then began to apply my special ingredients to the traditional Irish-American lamb chops my grandpa served me years before.
This is a fairly easy dish to prepare, and can be cooked in a variety of ways, so any man who knows how to cook meat (and what man doesn’t?), can make it without any trouble. In fact, it is so easy that, with proper supervision, even a wife could cook it!
Equipment:
Broiling pan, skillet, or grill, fork or spatula to turn the chops, and a cutting board to prevent a mess.
Ingredients:
- Lamb chop(s)
- Mustard powder
- Paprika
- Ground cumin
Cooking:
First, take your lamb chops and throw them on the cutting board. Let them warm up a bit so they cook more evenly. Sprinkle salt on both sides of the chops, and then get your spices. Coat the lamb on both sides with each spice, and then rub the powdered spices until they evenly cover the lamb. All of the spices can be applied equally, as together they create a savory aroma during cooking. Let the spices set onto the meat as they absorb its moisture.
Now comes the choice. You can barbecue, broil or sautée the chops, depending on your preference. I usually sautée them in an iron skillet during the colder months and grill them on the barbecue when it’s nice outside, but some may prefer broiling. If choosing to sautée, be sure to coat the skillet with just enough oil to keep the lamb from sticking. Whatever method you choose, just be careful not to overcook. Good lamb chops don’t take any longer to cook than steak, so they’ll be done in a matter of minutes if cooked over hot coals or on a hot pan. To test doneness, I use the fork method — simply gently press the back of a fork down on the center of the chop and feel how firm the meat is. When it is noticeably firmer than it was at first, the center has started to cook and it’s at least rare (my preference).
When the chops are done, they are ready to serve immediately. They can be accompanied by some mint sauce, which actually goes with the spices surprisingly well, or eaten as is. If not over or undercooked, the lamb will be delicious, and can be accompanied by whatever one deems appropriate. Red wine, obviously, goes well with this dish. Personally, I’d crack a Yanjing beer to go with them if I could get some over here.
Note on selecting chops:
Do not assume that you have to buy the most expensive lamb chops for this dish. In fact, cheap shoulder chops, provided they have sufficient meat on them, are as good as any other chop, and given the savory nature of the spices are probably a better choice than more expensive cuts, which tend to be more flavorful and better without too much enhancement.
{ 27 comments… read them below or add one }
Welmer
Those special spice recipees are handed down through generations. I´ve been trying to bribe,beg and plead me to one of the originals for years now. They´re worth more than gold to the respective families, especially if they´re in the rastaurant business.
These cooking threads are tits. Thanks, as I begin learning the art of cooking, its useful having these around.
I enjoy these cooking posts as well.
Unfortunately, I got violent food poisoning from a lamb curry several years ago and i have not been able to bring myself to eat lamb again since.
Love kebabs though! Definitely one of the very best ways to prepare meat and veggies simply!
Thanks for putting up the cooking recipes. These are really cool.
Great addition to the site. Do you take requests?
For recipes?
Sure, for recipes. I am an avid cook. In my circle of other cooking fans on FB we often take requests.
Well, give it a shot and I’ll see if I can come up with anything off the top of my head. But I’m afraid my knowledge of cooking isn’t quite encyclopedic yet. Perhaps the forum will be better for recipe sharing when it fills in — the more people the more recipes!
Good stuff with the recipes!
Men make better homes, and better cooks. In this day of equality, I see no reason that on a date, a man might cook dinner… but make sure to stand up, put your hands on you hips, and demand that since you cooked, she must wash the dishes.
I have had one too many women pull this stunned shit test on me, and I see no reason why a man who cooks, ought not pull it on a woman.
Tell her the toilet could use a cleaning while she’s at it.
oooh, nice. I loved the street meat in China, though I usually ate the chicken. We found a vendor in the Xi’an muslim quarter who was willing to take the bread and cook it up with the oil and spices, a la the rou, and it was sooooo good.
I’m going to have to try this out; I haven’t combined paprika cumin with mustard before. So exciting!
I’m going to try this recipe this weekend. I found some new zealand lamb chops at my local grocery store, so I bought some mustard powder and cumin.
Looks good.
Oh, you didn’t. (that means “Oh, you did”)
I docked lambs a few years back.
http://www.sheep101.info/tails.html
It was sooooo, sooooo funny. I had to prove myself to these farmers. They had such a good laugh and I had a great time being around them. I can’t even start to tell you what these guys are like but they are so awesome.
Hey julie….I used to be able to get Anchor NZ butter at my store. Best Butter in the world.
They stopped carrying it…I think I was the only guy buying it, as it was more expensive than all of the cheap, crappy butter American Factory Farming Corporations produce…
Aargh. I miss that Anchor butter!
Do you get Darigold in Hawaii? They make a pretty consistently good product here in Washington State. Nothing special, but you can always count on the quality. I think they started as a mainly Dutch dairy farmers’ coop up in Lynden, WA, around a hundred years ago.
Yeah, we got Darigold….the problem is I want GRASS FED, OPEN PASTURE dairy.
I’ve done a lot of research into, and the differences in quality and nutritional content is literally visible.
Anchor NZ butter is a very dark yellow color – full of Vitamins D, A, & K as well as a much higher Omega 3 fatty acid content…because it comes from Dairy Cows that are 100% grass fed.
Darigold and other brands, while decent, are pretty much Dairy Cows kept in barn stalls and fed grain feeds and other sources of food that are not as nutritional as free range grass. That’s why the typical, large American dairy’s that don’t have free range herds produce very light, white butter. Far less nutritional content and flavor.
Now that I can’t get Anchor, I just buy whatever American Grad A butter is cheapest…sometimes that’s Darigold, sometimes Challenge…
Hmmm…
I remember the butter we bought in France back in the 80s was quite white, and I’m pretty sure most of the French cows were grass fed. Do you think it might have something to do with the kind of grass the cows were eating? Lots of things come out in milk. I think a lot of the cows around here get timothy hay from the Kittitas Valley, which was originally a Northern European grass.
Once I fed my ex rosemary chicken, and after she nursed my son he smelled like rosemary for a day or so. It was pretty funny. He was possibly the most fragrant baby I’ve ever smelled. If you want a happy, fragrant baby, you should feed its mother mild, fragrant herbs and give her a small amount of dark beer, such as Beamish, to promote letdown:
Oh, HL, there is so much to say when it comes to NZ produce and other country produce.
I am totally one sided. lol
Some very strange things have happened in the US dairy industry. The main dairy breeds, primarily Holsteins, have been bred for high production to the point where the milk no longer contains enough milk solids to pass FDA minimum specifications. An interesting secondary dairy industry has therefore evolved raising Jersey cows which give much smaller volumes of milk, which are much richer than contemporary commercial dairy production. The richer milk is then mixed in with the watered-down milk to bring it up to minimum standards.
Having grown up on a Jersey dairy farm, I got used to doing the milking, straining the milk into gallon jars, and when the cream rose to the top skimming it off with a ladle. I made a real fool of myself when I went to college and got a glass of something labeled “skim milk” and could almost see through it. I complained to the food service that they had water in their milk, and everyone got a good laugh at the “dumb farm kid.”
My guess is that the commercial butter you are seeing has the absolute minimum fat content to qualify as “butter”, and a very high water content.
The milk we got in France came in glass bottles and had a fairly thick layer of cream at the top. I used to eat the cream with a spoon (I was a kid, and had no worries about cholesterol). I’ve never seen that over here.
It’s been illegal since the early 1960s. FDA, y’know.
Oh zed, Welmer, it goes much further than that.
Check this article out: Choosing Between Raw Milk and a Dead, White Liquid
“(I was a kid, and had no worries about cholesterol).”
Worrying about your cholesterol is a cultural myth every bit as destructive and false as the myths regarding feminism that we focus on here at the Spearhead.
I think my article for next week is gonna be about this particular topic.
Re. Grasses that our cows eat.
As some of you know, I dealt with some cancer over the past few years, and during the course of this, given my nature, I did a lot of reading and researching on cancer.
There is a controversy going on, since the 1950’s, about the validity of vitamin B17 in preventing the onset of cancers. The FDA banned vitamin B17 in the 1960’s because it contains a compound of cyanide. Actually, it is the cyanide which the proponents of B17 claim is what works – basically, when the vitamin travels through your body, it stays together as a compound until it encounters a cancerous cell. Then it separates and the cyanide compound attaches to the cancer cell and kills it.
I am not a scientist, so… take from it what you will. You cannot get vitamin B17 in the USA nor most of the western world. I believe you can buy it from the UK via online services. There are actually entire medical clinics filled with doctors from the USA and other Western countries that believe in this so much, that they have placed their clinics outside the western world so they can practise what they believe to be the best way to treat cancer, without the interference of the FDA. There is a large clinic near Tijuana, Mexico, that administer B17 through a compound called “Laterile”, and, they have a pretty good success rate… better than chemo or radiotherapy.
At any rate, the reason why they got onto this Vitamin B17 thing is because there are two populations on earth that never get cancer when they eat their traditional diets. One is a tribe that lives somewhere in the Himalayas. In that tribe, they eat Apricot Nut kernels (the seed inside the nut) as a delicacy/treat. This kernel is so incredibly high in B17… these people get regular doses of it through their regular diet.
The other population that rarely gets cancer is the Inuit. (Eskimos for you Alaskans). The Inuit eat a lot of elk meat. And, pray tell, what do elk eat? They eat the lichens found on the tundra. And what are lichens rich with? Vitamin B17, of course. So, they get vitamin B17 through their traditional diet of elk meat.
It has been noted that with both the Himalayan and the Inuit populations, when they leave their habitats (and thus their native diets) and move to the city and start eating the same foods as the rest of us, mysteriously, their rate of cancer quickly zooms back to near the same level as the rest of society.
Now, as for the cows.
Back in the year 1900, cancer only affected about 5% of the population in their lifetimes. Today, 1 in 2 men, and 1 in 3 women, will become afflicted with cancer at some point during their life. Approximately 40% of the population – and 800% increase in 100 years.
Something that has changed in the past 100 years? We used to feed our cattle on the natural grasses found in North America, (I don’t remember what the natural grasses were – clover? Not sure). At any rate, the natural grasses that we fed our cattle with back then were extremely high in vitamin B17! Good golly! The grasses we have replaced them with, in order to get higher hay production, doesn’t have any B17 content at all.
Btw. There would be virtually no financial gain if B17 were proven to be a cure, or rather, a “prevention” for cancer. (It is believed small doses would kill cancer before it forms – through diet, but once cancer has started, highly concentrated doses of B17 would need to be used to combat it). You can get regular doses of B17 by substituting alphalpha sprouts on your sandwich instead of lettuce, or, you can just buy plums, peaches or apricots, and then take the pitts, grab a hammer, and split the pitt open and chew the kernel inside of it. (They don’t taste too bad actually).
Anyway, I’m not a scientist, but, I’m just saying.
Wow….awesome info there, Rob!
And that’s not even getting into the much higher content of Conjugated Linoleic Acid that grass fed dairy has.
Oh, and we don’t even feed our cows grass at all anymore. Most are fed Soy-based feed.
And there are a whole host of problems as far soy goes too…
Yeah, HL,
I am not that much of a health food nut… but the cancer thing made me sit up pretty damn straight, lol! (I’m on the other side, yay!)
There are lots of “little” factors that I think can add up to big things.
I’ve been paying a lot more attention to my health lately… lol, those older guys were right… it is the most valuable thing you have.
I don’t really know what to do about it. I’m a beef-eater by trade. I order my meat medium rare – just to feign civility. I hate whole grain bread. I like eggs.
Aaargh!
Why can’t I be 16 forever? What happened to the trash can that was my stomach?
But, the cancer shaved off 43lbs. I now have a BMI of 22! PERFECT! I am near a washboard stomach, and damn well intend to be sporting washboard by my 40th next summer. Seriously! I am weight training again, and keeping calorie intake to 400 x 6 times a day. I am going into 40 in style dammit! A few years ago, I wasn’t sure 40 was even going to happen!
I am certainly no health food nut, but I find myself worrying deeply about my health.
Something that also extemely worries me is heart disease. A single man, aging alone, ought to be making measures to counter this, in my opinion. I had a close friend have a stroke once, in his 30’s, and he laid there paralyzed for a whole evening on the living room floor, until another buddy came by in the morning… we were wondering why he didn’t show up for breakfast before our dirtbiking adventure that Sunday… good thing the friend just walked into the house, without waiting for an answer at the door…
It bugs me, this health thing.
Alphalpha sprouts aren’t really that bad compared to lettuce though.
Heh…Rob, as much as you’ve delved into the history of feminism and exposed the communist roots and all that other invaluable stuff you did that got me blogging…
…I’ve done the same in terms of dietary advice. All that we are told about what is healthy and what is not is based on a host of lies and deceptions every bit as insidious and destructive as feminism.
I’m gonna make my next article here about that topic.
I shall wait with my bib on, with my fork and knife pounding on the table!