The Salted Lemon

Hey Becky-

Tried a new recipe today... lamb ragu. It's amazing how a $4/lb shrink wrapped appendage can be transformed into such a richly delicious stew. Anthony Bourdain wrote in The Nasty Bits that "any cretin can grill a steak after a few tries. It takes a cook to transform a humble pig's foot into something people clamor for"(20). Think about it... the steak in the grocery store on display beckons hungry customers to purchase it's cleanly cut and trimmed slab, an orb of red bloody perfection.
Meanwhile, the lamb legs, beef cheeks, and calf livers are piled into a cooler like the leftovers that they are. I tried beef cheek pierogis at a restaurant called Lola in Cleveland a few months ago... rich, marrowy flavor that I've been dying to recreate. Then I found the package of beef cheek not at Whole Foods or Fresh Market but at WalMart- $2/lb and it was enormous... literally half of a cow face trimmed. "How in the hell am I supposed to cook that?" I pondered. I don't even own a pot large enough to cook the monstrosity. A package of flank steak hit my basket.
So there I was yesterday, reading the recipe for lamb ragu- and it called for "lamb shank." Ok, leg of lamb, how bad can it be? Said leg of lamb was located in the requisite cooler next to the other parts... shrink wrapped five times and on sale. Covered in a layer of skin and fat, no less. It's amazing what slow cooking for three hours will do to even the most offending cuts. The fat dissipated, the marrow created a deep, flavorful broth and the remaining meat was tender. Ok, so it probably doesn't take a real cook to prepare unsavory cuts of meat... it just takes one to have the nuts to do it.