Birthday Boy Dinner

To celebrate John's birthday, I cooked him a special dinner.  Does this really surprise anyone?  Lamb is one of his favorite dishes, and I had never made it before.  Sadly for the birthday boy, I probably won't be making it again soon.  He loved it, but for some reason the taste of lamb doesn't do it for me (note, this is probably an understatement). 

I have only had lamb twice before, both times in Iceland with my mom.  I dug up this picture from an old email attachment.  Iceland is a really beautiful country, but the lamb hot dogs we had were a bit gross.  Ever since, I've been turned off by lamb.  Good thing I haven't developed an aversion to waterfalls or something --- the scar of the lamb hot dog did not ruin the whole trip!

Okay no more Iceland pictures circa 2005 - back to the present day.  Can't go wrong with roasted asparagus. 

I felt pretty guilty about buying slices of chocolate cake.  The more you bake from scratch the less interesting slices of refrigerated cake are. 

The lamb recipe is really easy.  You top the rack of lamb with olive oil, salt, and pepper and roast it for 20 minutes at 450 degrees (you definitely want to cook it longer than the recipe calls for - 10 minutes - because otherwise it comes out still "baa-ing" if you know what I mean. 

Then you top the lamb with melted butter and a mixture of parsley, garlic, lemon zest, and bread crumbs.  Pop it back in the oven for another 15-20 minutes until cooked to your liking. 

The crust gets nice and golden and makes for a beautiful piece of meat.  Ina's recipe can be found here, just make sure you cook it longer than the site says. 

And apparently whenever I cook John special dinners I make him fries.  I used a new recipe, and they came out amazing.  I will be sharing it in a later post, but I can go ahead and tell you that they come out tasting "fried" because they essentially are, just on a baking sheet.