Lamb Chops and Cucumber Salad

Sunday Night Dinner. Lamb Chops and Cucumber Salad

I live in an interesting place…Colonial Beach. About an hour or so out of the DC area. One good thing is it a small town, but it has limited access to good meat. So on Thursday I went to the Big City (Fredericksburg) to get my driver’s license, and I took my electric cooler with me and filled it up with fish, chicken, beef and…lamb.

Thus tonight’s dinner.

I love lamb, and I tend to always prepare it the same way. A rack of lamb ribs is heaven, but I’m cooking for myself these days, so while at the Publix, I found a nice package of 4 small lamb chops. Bingo. Lamb Robert is heaven, and a recipe for a crowd…in the future.

I bought a cucumber during my trip because…well, Lamb AND Cucumber! My cucumber recipe is already written up (search Fancy Cucumber on my website).

INGREDIENTS:

Lamb chops

Sea Salt

Fresh ground pepper

Olive oil

Garlic

Oregano

Fresh lemon juice (lamb is expensive…do not subject it to RealLemon)

DIRECTIONS:

An hour or two before dinner, mix your olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, oregano and lemon juice together. I put mine in a glass baking dish, but a gallon sized zip lock works too. I’m trying to cut down on my plastics. Toss in the chops. You can actually do this overnight, but I do like it being more of a subtle flavor, so 2 hours is fine.

If you’re doing the cucumber salad, do it at the same time so the flavors have time to meld into the cucumber.

Heat up a large cast iron skillet (grilling is great too but watch for flare-ups because of the olive oil) and put in a couple table spoons of olive oil. Bring up to temp, just barely smoking. Toss in the ribs and cook a couple minutes a side. Maybe 3, depending on the heat. You want a nice crust, and a pink center.

That’s it. Serve with the salad. For this recipe, it would be classic to use yogurt instead of balsamic. But I didn’t have any yogurt.