A butcher/ artist at Florence Meat Market cleaving then french-ing a rack of lamb for my dinner. I’ll post the finished product later this week, but it usually comes out something like this.

Roasted rack of lamb with orzo. The lamb from Florence Meat Market is really good so I like to keep it simple. I just seasoned, seared, roasted, then topped it with chopped parsley. This orzo is also easy and delicious. Sauté onions until soft in the same pan the lamb was seared in with some olive oil and butter. Add orzo and cook for a couple of minutes, meanwhile bring a few cups of chicken stock to a simmer. Add stock a little at a time, like when cooking risotto, until orzo is al dente. Finally, add heavy cream and parmesan and stir until thick and creamy, then stir in fresh parsley and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Layered Potatoes au gratin (and the usual Florence Meat Market NY Strip Steak). I should’ve taken a better photo of the potatoes, but when I took this one, I didn’t plan on making the post about them. Oops.

At some point recently in a restaurant (I can’t remember where), I was served a delicious potatoes au gratin with razor thin potatoes layered to about an inch high. Of course I wanted to recreate that at home. The best potatoes au gratin recipe is Jeffrey Steingarten’s from It Must Have Been Something I ate (required reading). But this recipe yields a thin layer of potatoes smothered in delicious browned cream and butterfat, and sometimes you want something with a little higher potato to fat ratio. I didn’t really like the recipes I was finding, so I borrowed from Jeffrey and Thomas Keller and came up with this. The beginning is labor intensive, but after that you just wait and eat:

Use a mandoline to slice paper thin slivers of 3-4 of the largest russet potatoes you can find into a large bowl filled cream, salt, and pepper (and smashed garlic, thyme, nutmeg, whatever you like). Mix the potatoes around in the cream and let them sit while you rub the bottom of a small baking dish with butter then line it with parchment. Rub some more butter over the parchment. Layer the potatoes as tightly as possible, with as little overlap per layer as you can manage. Every 2-3 layers, sprinkle with salt and pepper and add a few dabs of butter. When you’ve used up your potato supply or reached your desired height (2 inches pre-cooked is pretty good), add a few more dabs of butter and season. Cover the baking dish very tightly with foil, and bake for almost 2 hours at 350. Then turn up the heat to 450, remove the foil, pour two tablespoons of cream over the top, add a couple more dabs of butter, and cook for another 10-20 minutes until nicely browned.

Oh, and the wine with this meal was Outpost 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon Howell Mountain. 2007 is a great vintage in California and Outpost according to critics, and this cab doesn’t disappoint. It’s very enjoyable now as a young fruit bomb, but now that I’ve sampled, I won’t try it or it’s big sister the True Vineyard bottling again for a couple of years at least.

Roasted rack of lamb from Florence Meat Market. Getting a rack of lamb from my favorite meat guys is a real treat— they start with the whole rib cage and work their magic in front of you. The end result is a lovely frenched rack along with a skewer or two worth of fatty meat from the flap over the ribs. These skewers make great appetizers and would go particularly well with a couple of dipping sauces.

The wine is 2005 Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon Galitzine Vineyard from the Columbia Valley in Washington. The Galitzine Vineyard is Quilceda’s own young vineyard, just starting to produce wine-ready fruit over the last five or so years. This wine definitely needs some age, but it still shows lots of nice dark fruit and is really enjoyable after a couple of hours in the decanter.

Roasted half leg of lamb from Florence Meat Market and 2005 Shafer Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon. Leg of lamb is so easy to prepare— marinate in classic mediterranean seasonings then roast slowly. If the lamb is good (which this was) you almost can’t go wrong.

The 2005 Hillside Select is drinking really, really well right now. It will obviously only get better, but it’s as good a cal cab as you will find from the last few vintages.

Fat-wrapped prime filet topped with stilton and maple-glazed carrots. The filet from Florence Meat Market comes wrapped in fat which does a great job adding some flavor to this cut. Cheese is Colston Basset Stilton from Neals Yard, probably my favorite blue. Carrots were simply roasted and glazed with BLiS Bourbon Barrel Matured Maple Syrup.

Prime, dry aged T-Bone from Florence Meat Market and Thomas Keller’s Leek Bread Pudding from the Ad Hoc at Home cookbook. The quality of the steak goes without saying, so I’ll talk about the leeks and Ad Hoc at Home cookbook for a second. This is a really nice bread pudding, with just the right combination of melted Comté, mushy bread, and crunchy bread to make this as good texturally as it tastes. I’ve only made my way through a handful of recipes in Keller’s latest book (like Buttermilk Fried Chicken), but so far I would highly recommend checking it out.

Surf and turf. I’m not sure why, but I took this photo pre-saucing, and everything looked much nicer about 2 minutes later. Florence Meat Market prime dry aged strip steak (of course) soon to be topped with creamy green peppercorn sauce. The lobster tail was butter poached in beurre monté, which went into essentially a beurre blanc for serving. Not pictured are the truffled french fries that rounded out the maximum richness dinner.