Lamb. Its what's for dinner.

When my roommate Megan said that she wanted to celebrate Passover, I immediately began looking for Passover-approved recipes. She invited some friends over and we settled on a semi-Kosher menu for the evening, which included lamb as the main course, of course.

I'm not really a big fan of lamb. I've had it a couple times and just didn't really enjoy it. But you can't have a Passover seder and not have lamb. I found a recipe for lamb kebabs with tzatziki that looked pretty good so we decided to go with that. But the first step was to buy some lamb. We started at Winco, where we didn't find any. Then we went to Trader Joe's. Then to a Halal market across from Joe's, where we walked in to hear the sounds of meat being hacked into edible portions. The guy said, "uh...can I help you?" When we told him what we were looking for, he told us to come back the next day. Well, we didn't want to have to make another trip so we went to Safeway as a last resort. We finally found some lamb, but not the cut we were looking for. We got it anyway and decided it would just have to do.



The recipe called to marinate the cubed lamb overnight, so we got to work preparing it. The cut we bought was basically like a boneless leg of lamb. With plenty of fat and gross things still attached. So Megan and I had to figure out how to cut it into cubes. This was nearly impossible, but we eventually got enough semi-cube meat shapes out of the hunk of meat that we bought. I thought I was going to have to make Megan do this all by herself as it kind of seemed gross. But I did it just fine, in fact had to do most of it after Megan left for a soccer game (which her team won). Although I had to wash my hands about 50 times and went afterwards to the Plaid Pantry to buy bleach to sanitize every surface, the job was done.



Because of the mess we made of the meat, I was afraid it was going to not only taste gross (as I thought all lamb did), but that it would also be tough. I started cooking it with little hope of it turning out well. After making sure it was thoroughly cooked, I tried a tiny bite. It was tender. And it tasted GOOD! Since we have no barbeque or kebab skewers, we just cooked it in a pan. And cooked some potatoes and peppers as well so it would still kind of resemble a kebab. We also made the tzatziki, a traditional Passover fruit-ish salad and some brownies...extra-Kosher brownies.





It was a pretty fun night! There were six of us girls here and Rabbi Megan led us in the seder, reading the script-type thing she got from a friend of hers. It was geared towards families, so that made it kind of funny since there were no children in our group! But we went through the ceremony, prayed and ate the meal! Everything turned out really well, I was happy!



AND no one got food poisoning. Success!