Rustic Mediterranean

Menu:
Hummus and Pita
Grilled Panzanella Salad
Grilled Lamb w/Yogurt Mint Sauce
Cabernet Sauvignon


We usually start off our blog posts with the inspiration for the menu. Well, we did take a trip to the county fair the same day we made this meal, and we did see and pet several cute, little lambs, but these lamb chops were already in our fridge at home, we promise.  Luckily, Archer is not old enough yet to understand what Marc meant when he told him, after petting a lamb, that "We are going to eat one of those for dinner tonight." I guess you could say that we were inspired to make this meal when we saw the lamb chops in the meat case at the grocery store. We will do this quite frequently - just see what looks good. There are certain cuts or types of meat that our grocery store only has on occasion, and lamb is one of them. We also have been kicking ourselves these past few weeks that we didn't plant our garden this year, and so we have been without our normal crop of great, homegrown tomatoes. We made it a priority to find some "good" tomatoes at the local farmer's market, and we were successful. So, a combination of these two things inspired this menu. Another added bonus was that all of the cooking for this meal was done on the grill, and with two weeks of 100+ degree weather, not heating up the kitchen was even better.

As you can see above, we started off by marinating the lamb overnight in whole milk yogurt, oil, the zest and juice from a lemon, garlic, rosemary, salt, and pepper.  This sat in our refrigerator for about 12 hours which really helped tenderize and flavor the lamb. 

We love hummus.  Some store-bought hummus is very bland, so we make our own.  It really is very easy to make.  We do use canned chick peas rather than soaking and cooking dried chick peas, though, which makes it much easier.  We will experiment sometime with dried to see what difference it makes and let you know.  For our hummus, we dump chickpeas, garlic, lemon juice, tahini, salt, pepper, and Tabasco sauce in a food processor and pulse until smooth.  We served this with grilled pita, but we also love hummus as a veggie dip.

For the Panzanella, we used Ina Garten's recipe, which includes a combination of fresh and grilled vegetables.  We started with chunks of cucumber and the good tomatoes we had found earlier in the day.  We then grilled the onion and red peppers, brushed with a little olive oil, which really enhanced their flavor. 

Hannah, the oldest daughter, was joining us for dinner that evening.  We are lucky that she works at Panera and gets a great deal on bread.  We used a baguette she provided for our panzanella.  We sliced it, brushed it with olive oil, and grilled it until brown and toasted.  All of this is tossed with a vinaigrette of olive oil, red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, shallot, garlic, salt, and pepper right before serving.  This is a delicious, hearty salad that is perfect for summer.

The lamb was the easy part.  All we did was take it out of the marinade and throw it on the grill.  We like our lamb medium rare, so it didn't take long to grill.  It is important to use a hot grill so the outside of the meat gets a nice char while not cooking the inside too quickly.  With the lamb, we served a yogurt mint sauce.  This is one of Ina Garten's recipes (do you see a pattern) which includes Greek yogurt, green onion, fresh mint, fresh dill, garlic, crushed red pepper, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper.  This made a perfect accompaniment to the lamb.