The Passover story contains some info about a roasted lamb. There is even a roasted lamb shank bone on the sedar plate as a reminder of the story.
This was the first Passover sedar that Michael and I had ever hosted together so we wanted to include lamb on the menu and ideally have our very own roasted lamb bone for the sedar plate. Now Michael is not a really big lamb fan, but he did have a dish the other week up in Harbin that he really enjoyed so we decided to try to make it here at home. Please bare in mind that this was going to be our first venture into the lamb cooking arena.
The recipe we decided to use called for 6 lamb shanks. 'All right,' we thought, 'we can do that.' We went to the special butcher shop that is known for its lovely meat products and arrived just in the nick of time before they closed - phew. Michael dashed inside and bought the meat (and the horseradish since they had some.)
Here is where it gets tricky, not only are there a few options on how to define certain words, we are also working with a small language issue. Take for instance the word "shank" and lets pretend you have never looked at a picture of a lamb shank before and just know it has something to do with the leg. So Michael goes in and asks for the lamb shanks. The helpful store worker brings him 6 very, very large pieces of meat.
"6 of these?!?" thinks Michael. "I don't think so."
As a compromise, we bought only 4 and then figured out how to cook all that meat once we got it home.
Here's the punch line for those of you who have not already figured it out. As it turned out we had enough meal in 1 leg to serve all 12 people. (As a reminder - we bought 4.) To understand the difference in these two cuts, see the picture below.
See the large section that reads "fillet end of leg" and the small part underneath that reads "knuckle"? Oops.
Live and learn. At least now we have enough food to feed us for about 3 weeks.
(Just to show there is reason for confusion, you can check out all sorts of definitions of cuts here.)
1 comment:
Also... when talking about kosher lamb, the 'shank' is really the foreshank - ie: from the front of the lamb. These suckers generally feed one person per shank. Occasionaly a certain person in the family (Ed) has been known to eat two in one sitting.
Now, I realize that your butcher there may not be on top of the kosher cuts of lamb - but I'm guessing that's what you wanted.
What will you be doing with the rest of the shanks? ;)
PS: Had a lovely Shabbat dinner with your Mom and Leah at the Shapiros.
Pam
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