Green-as-Spring Lamb Stew
This week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe, Green-as-Spring Lamb Stew, is the perfect entrée for the winter weary. “The dish is really meant for spring,” Dorie says. “The stew’s vibrant color and deep vegetal flavor will match the landscape.”
What an understatement, to call the sauce green. Composed of arugula, spinach, parsley, dill, and tarragon, this is a brazen, in-your-face, do-I-really-want-to-taste-this dish? Green eggs and ham, okay. A shamrock shake? Yum. Green stew? That’s a stretch. It’s tasty. An ugly duckling, perhaps, but unique in its greenish sort of way.
The lamb simmers for 90 minutes in its vegetable broth.
Although Dorie’s meat choice is veal, I opted for lamb. Otherwise, Mary Had a Little Veal would not have worked as a title. Before tossing the lamb into a broth to simmer for 90 minutes, Dorie had us boil the meat in water for one minute to rid it of impurities that might cloud the sauce. After draining and rinsing the meat, I put it into the chicken broth along with carrots, celery, onions, garlic, thyme and bay.
Once the meat is cooked and set aside, the remaining ingredients are discarded, leaving just the broth. Reduced by half, it becomes a rich base for the sauce. Now here’s where we go green. That fresh arugula, spinach, parsley, dill and tarragon (six packed cups) are added to the boiling broth and cooked for one minute. The entire mixture is then blitzed to a thick liquid. Whisk in creme fraîche and lemon juice. Pull it all together and you’ve got stew. Green stew.
Green stew tastes better than it looks. Served with boiled new potatoes and curried beets with orange zest, it was a good and nutritious dinner last night.
This recipe, which included eleven different herbs and vegetables, and last week’s Baby Bok Choy & Company En Papillote were the perfect recipes to assist me in another project this month. Last year when I returned to Aspen, I was invited to join a nature study group of five other women, all volunteer USForest Rangers. To be truthful, I was never really invited to join. I heard they were having a meeting at the local library. By coincidence, I needed to return some books. I lingered at the library meeting room’s glass window with my nose pressed against it until they, guess what, let me in.
The two Donnas, cooking with Food Families: radishes (Brassicaceae Family); asparagus (Asparagaceae Family) and Lettuce ( Asteraceae Family)
We all share a passion for the great outdoors. During the past year we’ve studied, in depth, Rocky Mountain geology and it’s flora and fauna. We are learning more about western expansion, beginning with Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis & Clark expedition. This month we explored twelve of the families from the edible plant kingdom by coupling the common and recognizable foods we eat everyday with their wild flowering relatives who thrive in their natural setting in the Rockies.
Cooking from our food families, Donna G made Grilled Eggplant Rounds with ricotta cheese, basil and Dorie’s Slow-Roasted Tomatoes.
Using Deborah Madison’s Vegetable Literacy cookbook and Janis Huggins Wild at Heart natural history guide, we cooked, we foraged, we read and we analyzed. Last Thursday, at our monthly meeting, we presented papers on our chosen families. One of my families, Brassicaceae (mustard family), includes arugula, bok choy, broccoli rabe, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, napa cabbage, cauliflower and turnips, all vegetables I used in my FFWD recipes this winter.
Our group sometimes needs taste testers. Donna C’s husband, Steve, is always a volunteer and good sport.
Twelve members of this mustard family grow wild in the Rockies. All of them, Cardamine cordifolia (bittercress) or Noccaca montana (mountain candytuft), for example, can be used as herbs. Yes, I am becoming a forager. (Note to future dinner guests: I will not poison you.)
At our meeting Thursday we tried to identify the plants that are just peeking their noses out to see if winter is really over.
Food for thought: In this week’s recipe isn’t it amazing to realize the many ingredients we used, all representing many different families or sources, each with its individual characteristics and edible parts: Carrots, Celery, Dill and Parsley – Umbelliferae or Apiaceae Family; Onion and Garlic – Amaryllidaceae Family; Thyme – Labiatae Family; Bay Leaf – Lauraceae Family; Arugula – Brassicaceae Family; Spinach – Chenopodiaceae Family; Salt – Maldon, Blackwater Estuary, U.K.; Meat, Broth and Cream Fraîche – Cow, Lamb or Chicken.
Just think about it.
The two Donnas are trying to decide what can be served safely at dinner parties and what cannot!
Bringing the outside inside and putting it under the microscope. (The microscope was an anniversary present for Donna C (standing) from her husband, Steve, who is pictured above. Group gift. We were all thrilled.
French Fridays with Dorie is an international cooking group working its way through Dorie Greenspan’s Around my French Table. You can grab the recipe and go green here. To see what my Dorista family cooked up this week, check out our FFWD site.
I’ve always wanted to be a forager but the only thing I am interested in is mushrooms… and I’m too frightened to make a mistake… but when I am hiking I actually salivate when I see wild mushrooms. So interesting that you are learning about the wild foods of your area. My grandmother used to have us pick many weeds. She got mad when we called them that… said we were just ignorant of their uses. Glad you enjoyed your lamb… Mary.
Mushrooms are dicey. I don’t ever pick them. I just let them be. It takes a real expert to sort out the edible from the poisonous.
My dad used to love to mushroom hunt around Aspen…but we’d only eat the morels he’d bring home in Iowa. Sounds like you found a great new group of friends 🙂 And that you had a little lamb, too!
And, I bet he wouldn’t tell anyone where his secret hunting places were. Iowans never shared.
I’m envious of your natural world study group – and your new foraging skills. At one point I did a lot of mushroom hunting and was jut starting to learn about wild foods of the south when we relocated from the woods to the suburbs. Thank you for all the great info on the various families you/we have been cooking. I love this sort of stuff!
Sounds like a wonderful group. It’s fun that you can learn something new and put it into practice by eating.
I think the green sauce qualifies as something so ugly it is beautiful! Glad it worked out with the lamb. I substituted pork tenderloin. Glad to hear you are back on home turf. It sounds like you hit the ground running! Have a great weekend!
I enjoyed reading about your group. It sounds like a lot of fun. Glad you liked the stew.
I now have this mental image of you with your nose pressed up against the glass like a puppy waiting for a treat 🙂
My dad always used to be able to point out all the edibles when we would go on walks through the ADK’s. Sadly, I didn’t learn much – five year olds are very clever that way. I want to go foraging with you sometime! (Just don’t let me be in charge – I would probably end up poisoning someone)
Wonderful valentine to the Vixens.
the picture of the eggplant dish and The Donnas at the microscope makes me so proud.
What an exciting group! I have the Vegetable Literacy book (when I bought Veg), since I’d read an article (NPR?) about it and it sounded terrific. What a great project!! And a wonderful welcome back to CO.
I’m just now making the recipe. Using a veal chop I had in the freezer from when I didn’t get around to making “the” veal chop. It does smell good, and I’m inspired about the sauce now. Your dish looks fantastic!
What a fun and informational group! I’m sure your lamb tasted wonderful … I used pork tenderloin and I think chicken would be very good, too.
Sounds good with lamb Mary! So funny reading about your foraging adventures – last weekend Neil and I were trying to make a dish from the Noma cookbook that called for pine needles and Neil found some on a local tree, he was all excited. I started googling “are pine needles edible” and found that *most* are but there are 3 kinds that are not and then I started worrying. We didn’t use them 😉
Good decision, Mardi. Now I have the Valley Vixens (that’s the name of the group) hard at work researching what 3 pine needles are not edible. I am very wary of mushrooms and most of us here don’t pick them to eat. In France you can take your basket into the pharmacy for observation. Isn’t that right?
A terrific post, as usual, thanks for sharing! I made mine with lamb too!
Since I live in the country, I do some foraging…usually I go out looking for wild black raspberries…they make great jam! And I never give up my picking spots, lol! I also look for spring onions and dandelion greens in the early spring. Your stew looks quite good, Mary! Glad you enjoyed it! Your group sounds like fun…glad you are home safe!
What an interesting group – how fun! I love reading about your adventures.
Oh, and the Mary Had a Little Lamb Stew looks quite tasty too – I was a little too wrapped up in your foraging party!
What a great idea to use lamb for the stew! It goes perfectly with all the herbs! I used to go with my father and look for mushrooms in the woods around my hometown in Greece which by the way is very famous for its mushrooms. But I haven’t done for so many years now I am definitely going to poison my guests if I go alone looking for them 🙂
Hi Mary, your foraging group sounds interesting. I was not a big fan of this stew, but agree your choice of lamb was a good one.
I’m impressed and surprised by how versatile this stew ended up being. I made it with beef, which turned out delicious, and lamb sounds good too. I also think it would be good with chicken.