Farmer's Market Find: Lamb Chops

Yesterday I had a lovely afternoon with my mom at the Ripe Farmer's Market at Eilan. We went to a cooking demo with Sustenio's executive chef and enjoyed a tasty arugla, fried okra salad with corn vinaigrette. 

Of course the chef's knife skills were amazing and I learned a thing or two about how to properly dice a tomato.  

After the demonstration we wandered out to the meat vendor, Alamo Cattle Co., and I ended up buying some lamb chops and a package of bacon wrapped chicken breasts stuffed with de-seeded jalapenos and cream cheese. 

Let me say a thing or two about these chops.  Upon first glance, you might think $12 is too much to pay for them.  But au contraire.  With the right seasoning, these were amazing and I'm pretty sure I am going to be dreaming about them tonight.

The recipe we used to cook these can be found here- 10-minute Rosemary Lamb Chops.  It says it's for 12 chops, so my sous chef, Justin, and I just adjusted down a little bit. One of the coolest parts about it- we got to use the Rosemary from one of the bushes we have out back. We bought it to help keep the mosquitos at bay over the summer.

You can see that they are sizzling in the pan.  Well I heated it up under the broiler just as the instructions said to do.  And then they got 5 minutes in the oven. 

They weren't medium rare, but they weren't overdone either.  I definitely look forward to cooking these again. 

As a side I thought a cauliflower gratin might be good.  So I found this recipe for a skillet cauliflower gratin. And took a head of cauliflower from this:

To this!

Because I am trying to eat lower carb, I subbed out the regular flour for soy flour and the bread crumbs for pork rinds.  As a whole this was also pretty delicious. 

So for dinner we had a pretty full plate:

Justin wouldn't mind having something green on the plate next time, but I know he's gonna go to bed and dream of the lamb chops too.  

Side note- this was my first attempt at cooking lamb chops ever, so this recipe is pretty fail proof. Also my first attempt at the cauliflower gratin.  Obviously I would happily make both again!

Pinterest Cauliflower Pizza Dough

I have to tell you the truth. 

I'm addicted to Pinterest.

But, and this is something to consider, I've actually made stuff from there. Not as much as some, but more than others. So at least there's that. Which I guess isn't really much. You know what is really something though?

Cauliflower Pizza Dough!!!!!!

I'd seen it and pinned it, twice actually. Here and here.

For this little kitchen experiment, I went with pin numero dos. Which links to a pretty cool site that I haven't spent much time on, but I want to give the Cook Lisa Cook blog the credit it deserves for making this a pretty successful endeavor.  Again, I didn't change the main part of the recipe so please go to her site and give her the hits it deserves. But if I can do it... you know what comes next.

I didn't take pictures of all of the steps, but it looks pretty similar to what you'll see on the Cook Lisa Cook blog when you go for the step by step. 

This was mixing the riced cauliflower with the egg and cheese to bind everything together.

Justin walked in I was mixing the dough. He later told me that when he saw it he was "less than enthused" because he hadn't enjoying the pureed cauliflower experiment that I did not document. Let's just say it has to be really hot to be enjoyable and comparable to mashed potatoes.

The dough all spread out on the countertop convection over tray.

The beef cooking up. I am a meat eater. (Not a "that's what she said joke.")

The dough all crisped up and ready for toppings! I was getting excited at this point.

A bad picture of the finished product, but still tasty looking! Loaded with part skim mozzarella and about 2 ounces of beef on each side of the pizza.

 I do think I would cook it in the big over next time, or use less dough, so it is thinner and crispier throughout.

But even Justin said it was a lot better than he expected, so I'd say it's a win!

Do you think you might give this recipe a spin?

Pinterest Sweet and Spicy Cucumber Salad

More Pinterest recipe success.

Granted, this one didn't call for any real cooking, just the ability to measure and mix. As well as some patience with trying to remove the water from cucumbers.

If you want to repin it from me, then awesome. You can find it right here.

If you want to go straight to the recipe source, because I didn't tinker with it, then that's available here.

I managed to turn these bland cucumbers from this:

Into this beauty that I ate every lunch for almost an entire week:

In addition to looking awesome, it actually kept pretty well the entire week too.