Easter Lamb

I have been excited for about the past month about cooking for my family on easter, because I was going to get to make rack of lamb. Just looking at the rack of lamb made me want to cook it because it just looks so cool and sophisticated, if I want to think of myself as a "chef" I needed to be able to cook something like that. For dessert I was going to make something I had recently seen Tyler Florence make on an episode of Tyler's Ultimate, banana cream pudding. With home made whip cream how could a creamy banana pudding be bad, he made it look so go I had to give it a try. Of course both the lamb and the pudding almost turned into a disaster, but I think I kept my cool and both still ended up coming out pretty well.

The recipe for the lamb I got here, from Emeril, for my first time cooking lamb I figured Emeril would be a chef I could trust. Well I'm not sure if my oven wasn't hot enough or what but after browning the lamb on all sides and roasting it in the oven for 15 minutes, I cut into the rack and it was still basically raw.

Raw!

I didn't realize this until I was cutting the lamb in to individual chops at my aunt's house to serve. So I was a bit flustered as I'm cutting into this lamb and realizing it was raw. Luckily we through it into her oven on broil and cooked the individually cut chops for about another 5-8 minutes, a couple minutes on each side. So either Emeril like's his lamb raw or if you are going to try this recipe out cook the lamb for at least an additional 7-10 minutes. I would think there is nothing worse than overcooked rack of lamb, but I could definitely say the same for undercooked raw lamb. The flavor was great and after the extra broiling, we all thought the lamb was great, and it was still a medium rare, the way it should have been cooked. One other thing I added to this recipe was some chopped fresh rosemary to the crust. I looked at a bunch of lamb recipes and most included rosemary, so I did and it really helped to brighten the flavor of the lamb.

The dessert, I was also really excited for, maybe for the simple fact that for the two weeks leading up to easter, when I saw the recipe, my brother bitched at me every day about not making it or how I could make it better. If you know my brother than you would know how particular he is. If something isn't his way then he will let you know about and keep letting you know until it becomes his way. He is under the impression that the only dessert worth eating is a cake with buttercream frosting, and if that wasn't going to be what I was going to make, he wanted nothing to do with it. So basically for two weeks straight I had him bitching and moaning that we weren't going to have a dessert that he wanted, so even if this was going to be the worst dessert of all time I was going to make it just to burn him.

This is the recipe, courtesy of probably my favorite food network chef, Tyler Florence. The flavor was great however, it didn't set right, it stayed basically like a liquid. So the next time I make this I will probably add about another 1/4 cup of corn starch, and see how that thickens it up. The pudding is basically like any other sauce that you would thicken with flour or cornstarch, which I have done plenty of times, but this pudding just wouldn't thicken, so I figure if I add more corn starch it should get to the thickness that you would want from a pudding, or pastry cream, which Tyler said it basically is. One change I also made to this recipe was instead of just lining the bottom of the serving dish with vanilla wafers, I did the wafers but added a chocolate ganache to wafers, so the ganache and wafers basically became like a crust, which was a really good addition. There is not many better flavor combinations, for me, than chocolate and banana's.

All in all I thought the meal came out about as good as it could have, considering I was making two dishes I had never done before. With the tweaks, that I know now the next time a make either of these dishes I think they should be even better.

Eat well, Live well