As some of you may know, I’m a proud Armenian – and grew up associating the smell of lamb with a big celebration with family and friends. As I got older, my friends and I took it upon ourselves to reinstate what had become a lost tradition at our church – the church picnic. As Armenians, a good deal of our community events revolve around our church. Each fall and spring, our church has a picnic in the back of the church property – with music, kid’s games, and of course – food! The week before each picnic, we order lamb from the local butcher and we trim it, cube it, and marinate it before the picnic. It’s a lot of work but actually a lot of fun! We try to have 8-10 people there, but sometimes we have as few as 3 people there. My friends, cousins and uncle go to church on a weeknight and stand in the church kitchen, with our aprons, talking about life, sports, our day – and accomplish the monumental task of trimming almost 200 lbs of lamb! Throughout the night, the air is full of the sounds of laughing, a mixture of Armenian/English language, “remember when” stories, knives sharpening, criticism of the meat given to us by the butcher and of course, in true Armenian fashion – complaining about the price!

The cleaning process yields a decent amount of “scraps.” But it’s a shame to let these pieces go to waste. They often consist of small pieces of meat that may have some fat but are still fine to eat. So instead of throwing it out, we distribute them among us workers to take home as a small reward.

This time, I didn’t even put the meat into the freezer because I knew I would be cooking it the next day. I decided to make myself a lamb meal and salad. As most of you know, we live in a condo – so unfortunately no grill. But I find that the broiler works almost as good! So I set the broiler on high and got to work on the lamb. I marinated the lamb using the following:

• red wine vinegar
• olive oil
• black pepper
• garlic salt
• zatar spice
• Mendocino Sea Smoke Salt (We met the people from mendoseasoning.com at the 2010 Foodbuzz Festival – a wonderful couple and their salt is amazing!)
• a dash of A1 steak sauce.

Ok – I know – that list above is incredibly random and weird. BUT IT WORKS! I usually do a different mix of things each time I prepare meat. I laid the meat out on a tray and then placed it into the broiler on high. When the meat came out of the broiler – it was bursting with flavor!! As soon as it began to brown I watched it carefully and pulled it out – putting it on a plate with my favorite bread – Armenian lavash bread (much thinner than pita and easier to roll with).

For my salad, I did one of my usual “everything salads.” Again, don’t be freaked out by the ingredients – it worked!

• Romaine lettuce
• Feta cheese
• Champagne mango
• olive oil
• lemon juice
• garlic salt
• chopped carrots

As you might guess, this was a very random assortment of leftovers. We are out of town this weekend for a wedding and I wanted to use up foods (to the extent it made sense). I was alone for dinner so I experimented a little more than I would have had Sabrina been eating with me (although she usually likes my experiments). It was delicious and although I couldn’t eat this many flavors at every meal or even every day, sometimes it’s good to just take a risk and mix random things to see what works and what doesn’t. I’m happy to say that this one worked!!

What are some of your strangest food combinations that you have tried and are now in love with?