Lamb chops

Eastside Road, October 10, 2011—

OF ALL THE MEATS THAT WE DO EAT —
Chicken, beef, or ham —
The one that tickles my palate the most
Is lamb, lamb, lamb…

So used to sing Virgil Thomson, and so sing we.

Pavel has his Sausage Dance: in his Slavic way, when sausage is served, and the spirit moves him, he will put the platter of sausage in the center, and form a ring around it with his family, and they will slowly dance around it, chanting Sau-sage, sausage, we are going to Eat You. Lindsey and I do not do this; it seems barbarous. But we do occasionally, when the spirit moves us, glance at one another over a lamb chop, each of us thinking of Virgil, and our Lamb Song is not always merely silent.

Our daughter-in-law is, I think, the chief stock person in her family; our son is too busy with other things to attend to the ongoing daily requirements of tending animals. Among their beasts are sheep, and now and then we're the beneficiaries. Today, for example, we had four delicious little lamb chops.

I salted them and sprinkled Herbes de Provence on them and a little dried lavender, and Lindsey broiled them in the oven - it was too murky and busy a day to build a fire outside. I'd cut a couple of potatoes into dice and cooked them in fairly deep olive oil, say halfway up the sides of the dice, until they were brown and crisp. Chard, as you see, from the garden.

Lamb, lamb, lamb
lamb-y lamb lamb
lamb, lamb, lamb
lamb-y lamb, lamb

Chateau de Voiture, 2005; Salice Salentino, 2007