Welcome to kidscookdinner.com, a website that I (Max) started with my sister (Alex) in 2015 to talk about our cooking experiments and encourage kids to cook more.  We are fortunate enough to have plenty to eat in our family, so we also founded it to draw attention to the issue of hunger.  Especially as this challenging year draws to an end, if you are able, consider donating to a hunger or poverty relief charity.  Two of our favorites are Action Against Hunger and City Harvest.  To learn more about kidscookdinner.com, scroll down a few posts.  To see what we’re cooking today…stay right here.

Tonight I decided to try to cook Lamb Riblets.  I had never heard of them, but my family bought a whole lamb from Herondale Farm (an organic farm in the Hudson Valley).   We love lamb but it’s not always available in the grocery store, and when it is, it’s often very expensive, so we thought it made sense to buy one.  We also wanted to support small farmers like Herondale’s.  However, when you buy a whole lamb, you get everything, including heart, liver, and riblets.  Fortunately, it comes butchered, frozen, and in vacuum packs.

Riblets look sort of like beef short ribs and when I looked up recipes, I found a simple recipe for garlic roasted ribs. It looked delicious and the ingredients were straight forward:

Here’s the recipe:

• 1-1/2 pounds lamb riblets
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 4 minced garlic cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/2 teaspoon  paprika

After preheating the oven to 375 degrees, the next step was to chop the 4 cloves of garlic.

Then I combined the paprika, onion powder, olive oil, salt, and garlic and rubbed the mix all over the lamb.  I added a bit more olive oil because there wasn’t quite enough of the mix.

This is what they looked like before I put them in the oven:

After 45 minutes, I took the riblets out:

Dad had bought Indian food from Ozone Park in Queens, where his office is, and we combined that with the riblets. The nan, rice, and chicken masala were a good complement.

To be honest, the riblets were good but the Indian food was better.  The lamb meat was delicious but there was a lot of fat and sinew around it. Next time I cook them, I think I will braise them–cooking them for a long time in a slow cooker– to dissolve all that, and then remove the fat.  Live and learn (and happy new year!)