Lamb Chops and Hand Mashed Potatoes

For this I do not have a straight step by step recipe, but I can give you a few tips and pointers as well as a funny story. Lamb isn't everyone's favorite, sometimes it's gamey or sometimes it smells a bit odd, but, if you marinade it for about 2 days (48 hours or so) it may help it be a bit more tender. I throw our chops in a gallon sized plastic bag with some parsley, diced garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper and 3 squirts of lemon juice. From there it went in the fridge and hung out there for about 48 hours or so. I pulled it out of the fridge when we started the grill, just so it wasn't going right on the char grill right out of the fridge. I cooked the lamb chops on the edge of the char coal fire flipping twice, every roughly 3 minutes to get some char marks on them and to avoid over cooking them. Closer to the bone was more rare, I'd say they came out about Medium and pink in the time I cooked them. If you'd like them more well done I suggest leaving them on a bit longer.

Now comes the funny part. You may ask why hand mashed potatoes? Well, we are in the midst of packing up our house to move and I packed the hand mixer thinking we still had the standing mixer out. The standing mixer was out, but the bowl was packed away, so, Chris was nice enough to step in and mash the potatoes by hand with some butter, whipping cream, salt and pepper. I boiled the potatoes for about 35 minutes (5 medium sized russet potatoes) before we mashed them. I started them when Chris started the char grill knowing the lamb would not take long. It worked out well. The gravy was just jared as we had had a busy week at work, and It was just one less thing to worry about. I plated 3 lamb chops around my mashed potatoes, sprinkled with parsley and dove in! I used the mashed potatoes as a boat for the gravy, I wanted to show off those lamb chops and the grill marks and not cover them up with the gravy. If you get the grill hot enough before the lamb goes on, you may even be able to get some pretty diamonds on the outside of those lamb chops. Maybe next time!