Rosemary Lamb Chops with Sautéed Potatoes

Firstly before I forget, we recently decided to come out of the closet in a manner of speaking.  I’m sure that regular readers have noticed the change in our names on the site.  We’ve grown quite attached to our pseudonyms of Fred and Ginger over the past two years and a bit, but finally decided to change to using our real names.  We just updated our about us page and didn’t post anything about it explicitly, but thought it worth a quick mention in case people thought they’d arrived at the wrong site, what with the recent semi-redesign too.

We weren’t sure what to cook this evening, but we had some lamb chops in the freezer so decided to use those up.  We also had potatoes to use up, so that of course meant sautéed potatoes, which we often have with lamb chops. The lamb chops were defrosted and were a bit squashed up from being in the freezer, so don’t look very cutlet-like unfortunately.  They did taste good though, which is what really counts in these sorts of situations.

We coated the chops in a mixture of salt, pepper and quite a lot of finely chopped rosemary.  Then we heated up a little olive oil in a frying pan and pan fried them on medium (or even medium-high) for five minutes on one side, then three to four minutes on the other side.  As they were quite thick chops, this left them nicely pink in the middle, but not too much so.  Then we let them rest for a few minutes.

For the sautéed potatoes, we slice some potatoes into discs first, them steam them.  When they are almost cooked, we remove them from the steamer, let them dry out, then cut the discs into cubes.  We start by frying some chopped onion in some olive oil, then after that has softened for a few minutes, add some more olive oil and add the cubed potatoes.  Season with plenty of salt and pepper and some chopped thyme.  Agitate and flip them in the pan regularly so that the potatoes and onions don’t burn.  Near the end, add some chopped parsley too and check to see if you need more salt and pepper (I usually find this is the case!).  If they look too dry at any point, add some more olive oil (I usually find this is the case too!)  This of course needs to be started well in advance of cooking the chops as it takes a while.

The potatoes can take a number of different herbs and you can probably put in whatever you like, varying it depending on what you are serving them with.  Raymond Blanc put parsley and chervil into them once on television, which sounded interesting but we have never tried that.  This time I think we steamed the potatoes a little too much before sautéing them, but that did result in some nice crispy bits so it wasn’t too bad.  My mum used to cook these when I was younger and the first time I ever tried to cook them, I didn’t realise that you needed to steam or parboil the potatoes before sautéing them; needless to say my attempt wasn’t very successful.

The sweetness of the onion goes very well with the lamb chops, as does the general herbiness, olive oiliness and slight crispiness of the potatoes.