A (Lamb) Shoulder To Cry On

I’ve been pretty low lately. The type of low in which popular songs on the radio bring me to tears*. Work is kicking my ass (and biting my ankles and just generally pantsing me). I’m trying to keep my chin up, reminding myself that (1) I am lucky to have a job, (2) I am not caught in a natural or man-made disaster, nor do I have a terminal disease, and (3) most rough patches eventually pass. If I’m being honest, though, I am very rarely comforted by (1) or (3).

(*And we’re not talking Radiohead or Elliott Smith or anything else that might justifiably produce a sniffle or two. These days, I will straight up cry at Usher. Shameful, right?)

At times like these, I need a project. Thankfully, I still had two primals left in the freezer from my Valentine’s Day lamb, so out came the shoulder quarter for a Saturday afternoon of butchery practice.

Shoulder quarter

The shoulder works hard in an animal: forward motion, bending to graze, and all that. Hard work generally means flavor, but at a price. The price is substantial amounts of connective tissue and intramuscular fat: a dynamic duo that respond best to low-n-slow cooking. The shoulder quarter also has some funkily-placed bones in it (perhaps not funkily-placed if you are a lamb), meaning that more than once I muttered (exclaimed) below (above) my breath, “Well, what the #$%@ is that?” The cats, bless ‘em, pretended not to be scandalized by my unladylike language.

Clockwise: Ryan Farr's excellent exegisis on butchery, semi-boned shoulder, boneless shoulder chop.

Once again, I turned to Ryan Farr’s “Whole Beast Butchery” for guidance. I removed the foreshank, and then separated the shoulder into two halves. The first part I rubbed with toasted cumin, coriander, fennel seed, S&P, as well as a dash of my homemade Worcestershire sauce (pats self on back for making Worcestershire sauce) and braised in a low (290F) oven with at least a thousand cloves of garlic for four hours*. The collagen melted into a delicious, sticky, saucy mess and the meat shredded with just a pointed gaze in its general direction.

I made some very unattractive corn tortillas, whipped up a batch of guacamole, and we feasted on delicious, if ugly, lamb tacos with quick pickled onions and a side of Rancho Gordo beans (simmered for hours with a chunk of my house-cured ham**). A bottle of Le Telquel, a Gamay and Grolleau blend from the Loire, redolent of cherries with a little barnyard funk, paired pretty damn nicely. Thank you, Campus Fine Wines!

(*This aroma will induce full-on whorish displays from hungry cats.

**Full disclosure: I let this ham over-dry, so it’s not much good for snacking on—it’s kind of jerky-ish, and not in a yummy way—but it works great for simmering in beans!)

Who can be blue when there are tacos?

The other half of the shoulder I made into an embarrassing amount of merguez. You should all come for dinner and help us eat it. We’ll discuss that later.

So: blue mood forgotten, albeit temporarily, but all in all, a triumph of gluttony over gloom.

What’s great shoulder-cutting music? I went for pure psychic joy: the soundtrack from the 1982 masterpiece “Valley Girl.” The Plimsoles, The Clash, Men at Work, and the adorable Josie Cotton, whose “Convertible Music” I listened to nonstop for an entire month one summer. Totally tubular.