Marinated Grilled Lamb Chops with a Mint Pesto and Grilled Vegetables

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and today we're going to be making a marinated lamb chop with a mint pesto. So let's get started. First thing we need to do is make our marinade. So I'm going to start with some olive oils from Spain, extra virgin olive oil. Need a couple tablespoons. We have some sea salt and cracked black pepper, about a teaspoon of each. Now we have some lemon zest, probably about a packed teaspoon of lemon zest. We're just going to stir these up real well. I can smell that lemon. It's going to be so good. Alright, so it's pretty simple. What we're going to do is take lamb chops, and I've gotten porterhouse-style lamb chops. This is with the little fillet and the strip right here. Now you can use any lamb chops that you like on this. If you have just regular, like the lollipop style, that will work fine too. But they had these in the store. I really like these, so I thought I'd buy these. So all we have to do now is take a Ziploc bag, we're going to put the lamb chops in there, and then we're going to put our marinade in, which is just really the olive oil from Spain, cracked black pepper, sea salt, and lemon zest. It's pretty simple. Now you can add a little garlic to this if you like, and I think I'm going to. So I have a little piece of garlic here. I'm just going to smash it, smash it up a little, break it up in a little few pieces. It doesn't have to be small. I just want to get some of that garlic flavor in here. Zipp up the bag. Then we're going to work— let's get the air out of there first. It will make it easier. So you want to lay it flat, get the air out of the Ziploc. Once the air is out, then we can just work that olive oil into the lamb. Alright, so what we're going to do now is we're going to put this in the refrigerator for about an hour, and then we're going to go back and we're going to grill our lamb chops. Okay, our lamb chops are marinating in the refrigerator, and they need about an hour in there. So while that's working, we're going to make our pesto. Now, mint pesto is a little bit different from a regular basil pesto. That you might have seen in restaurants or you make at home. It's going to start pretty much the same way, but instead of basil, we're going to use fresh mint leaves. And what I did with the mint leaves is you want to go through them some and get rid of these ugly stems. You know, you don't want to— you don't need to get all of them, but you want to try and get as much as you can because they're not going to be very flavorful, liable to be a little bit bitter. So we want to Just get rid of those stems if you can. Alright, so we've got the mint in here, and actually what I used was— they didn't have any real big bunches— I bought 2 of those little plastic containers that they sell in the grocery stores of mint. And then we're going to put in some parsley, and it's about Italian parsley. And again, all the stems— or not all of them, but a lot of the big stems are taken off, and we're going to mix this in too. Now depending upon how much you like mint, it will be how much parsley you put in it, because the parsley is going to add some volume to it and it's going to cut back on that real, real strong mint flavor if you're not a real big fan of mint. I like mint, but I like it in a little bit lesser quantity, so I put about half the amount of parsley in as I did as mint. So right now I'm just going to put this on and I'm going to pulse it. All right, so we've got that started pretty good. You can see it's pulsed, it's not completely done. Now I'm going to put in some salted roasted almonds. Now you can use plain almonds, you can toast them in the oven, you can toast them in a pan, whatever you prefer, but I like the taste of a little bit of salt in here because we're not going to put in the Parmesan cheese or the Romano cheese that we usually do, so I want a little bit of salt in them. So I've got about tablespoon of almonds, got a clove of garlic, and then I have some more lemon zest, and about a tablespoon, not packed, lemon zest this time. So what we're going to do now is we're going to pulse, get our almonds all ground up. And you want to pulse it pretty good until you know you've got those almonds really, really broken up. Alright, now is when we add in our olive oil. I've got olive oil from Spain, and we're going to put the olive oil in and watch it and see how it comes together, and that's when we'll know how much it's going to be, but it's probably going to be about a tablespoon or two. You just drizzle it in slowly. I like my pesto just a little bit on the loose side, but depending on how you like it. Okay, now I'm gonna pulse. I'm gonna actually go in here and I'm gonna get a rubber spatula and clean it out because what happens is the oil has settled a little bit on the bottom. Because we're not making a lot and there isn't quite as much volume in this, If I was making it in a restaurant, this would be almost full. It would come out to be about a half. We're just making it for this. So you can either mix it in by hand, or after you've gotten the olive oil off the bottom— okay, you can see now, you know, the oil is a little bit more incorporated and I got it off the bottom. I'm just going to pulse it just a little bit more. So that is perfect. I'm going to get rid of the blade. Don't want to lose any of this. Ah, smells good. So now we've got this all made. We're going to take it and just put it in a bowl, and we're going to refrigerate it until it's time to serve the lamb. Mmm, smells good. Okay. So you can see there's a little oil gathering in the bottom. That's okay because we can always mix that back in. We get a nice dark green color. You can see the bits of almond in here, which is fine. It's actually going to be good for how we're going to serve this with the lamb to have a little bit of texture, a little bit more texture in there. So, mm, just going to try it. Very good. Can use just a little bit more salt if you want to put a little salt in it, because this is really going to be the seasoning for the lamb when we serve it. So if you like this a little spicier, this is where you can make this pesto your own. If you want to put a little heat into it, add some red pepper flakes. You can season it with more sea salt or however else you'd like to make it. Again, this is a very A recipe is not etched in stone, so make it your own. Alright, we are done grilling, and I also cooked up a nice variety of vegetables to go along with it. So we're going to plate it up. So let's move this over to the side a little bit while we plate up. And you can serve it this way family style, it will go great. All right, we're going to take 2 of the chops, and I would serve 2 to a portion. I think that's plenty of food, plenty of meat for someone. If you want to do 3, you can do 3, but let's do a lot of vegetables. We eat way too much protein and not enough vegetables, so let's make a nice little plate here with vegetables. I have leeks in here, mushrooms, red pepper, potatoes, fennel, tomatoes. I think that's it. Yep. So, you know, it's basically what I had on hand. So, you know, that's all you really need to do is find what you have on hand and serve up. And there is actually more vegetables, so I did cook enough for 3 portions if you want to go that way. It's perfect to serve. Alright, now that we have this, what I want to do is I'm going to take our mint pesto. I'm going to take a little bit of this mint pesto. I'm just going to serve it right on top. Now we will put this on the table. If anyone wants a little bit more, we're going to take a little bit of parsley and we're just going to garnish Make it look pretty. And that, my friends, is marinated lamb chops with a mint pesto and grilled vegetables. And there we have it.