My husband, poring over his Anne Willan and Julia Child cookbooks, murmured something about “a year of lamb in 12 recipes.”
I joked that it would be a good title for a podcast about making our way through the meat in our freezer, starting with a leg of lamb he’d roasted for Christmas dinner for six.
In 2024 my husband ordered half a lamb from a vendor at his favorite Denver farmer’s market. When it arrived months later, we discovered it was just 14 pounds – you don’t know beforehand how much lamb you’re ordering.
At 14 pounds, it was the size of a large chicken. So last year he decided to buy a whole lamb. Couldn’t be more than 30 pounds, right?
My husband picked it up the weekend he got our two turkeys of 18 pounds apiece for our Thanksgiving feast for two dozen from the same farmer.
The farmer told him that the grass had been particularly good that season. Our little lamb was 61 pounds. A surprise for my husband, particularly because he rides his bike to market. Good thing it’s an electric cargo bike, with a bin large enough for several cases of wine.
Ninety pounds of meat fit neatly in his bike bin. But it was a bit more than our freezer can handle, so he headed from the market first to his mom’s house nearby to store some in her freezer.
The lamb came butchered and packaged. Neck slices, leg, rack, shoulder, chops, liver, kidney. Breast that my husband boned, rolled and tied in kitchen string to bake with onions, a la francaise. Fat plastic sausages of ground lamb, some of which we’ve eaten as a ragout. And fries, the lamb equivalent of Rocky Mountain oysters, on which the Willan and Child books don’t offer much advice.
Our friends invited to dinner will be seeing a lot of lamb menus.
I am certain we will have a delicious year. But my husband doesn’t listen to podcasts, much less aspire to create one, so you won’t hear about it from him.
Besides, he pointed out, we’d eaten a few more appendages since Christmas. We’re already “three legs in.”
Another good title.