You know what I hate? Parades. You know what else I hate? Parades’ ill-disciplined cousins, street fairs. I hate the crowds, I hate the noise, I hate the hassle. So you know what? I don’t go to them. For the most part this works out just fine. Once in a while some well-intentioned person will invite me to a parade or street fair and I politely decline.
But every Memorial Day Weekend I am forced to confront Caranval!. Carnaval! takes over our neighborhood. Carnaval! as you might have already guessed, largely consists of, yes, a parade and a street fair. Those are the defining events of Carnaval! as far as I can tell. Roads are closed, music finds its way through the air into our house, parking spaces are at an all-time premium, even on our quiet little street. And I am psychically and physically surrounded by parade and street fair.
And you want to know the worst part? I forget about it every year. It catches me off-guard and in-town. All of the sudden competing samba music, steel drums, and house music come floating through the air and I innocently wonder who’s having the big party. And it stays like that for a bit before reality sinks in and I realize that everyone is having the big party and I’m stuck for the weekend.
So I took my frustration out on a leg of lamb and we invited some neighbors over–no one had to drive or give up their parking spot. Brilliant!
I grilled this butterflied leg of lamb in an onion and garlic paste marinade pretty much according to this recipe I wrote for Sunset a few years ago (except I left out the rosemary). Ignore the picture with the recipe on the Sunset site: don’t roll and tie the lamb, grill it flat as stated in the directions to get plenty of onion-pasted crispy bits, which is what everyone wants. (The reason the picture with the recipe in the magazine was rolled? The food stylist thought it looked better. We had to write all these weird explanations in the captions. One editor wanted me to re-do the recipe to match the picture. I refused because it is less delicious if you roll it. I became a bit difficult over this small issue. Stubborn, entrenched, inflexible. Because no matter how pretty that picture is, you get globs of semi-uncooked onion paste in the meat if you roll it. And who wants to have their name associated with that?)
And be sure to make the yogurt mint sauce to go with it. I served it with rice pilaf and green beans. A big green salad would have been welcomed too, but we had a shaved fennel concoction with chunks of Meyer lemons in it.
But we started the meal with a beautiful piece of smoked salmon my Uncle Denny caught, smoked, and carried down from the Olympic Peninsula for us. It was a particularly fine specimen savored by all.
Ernie’s favorite part? A bit of the skin.
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