In our family we have the NMMU Rowing Captain Carnivore who is well versed in the art of inhaling food and the horse riding nut who has sworn off of red meat. This results in a situation where we almost always end up catering for two different meals at supper time.
With the Rowing nut stepping up his training pace I was faced with 4 chicken breasts and 4 lamb chops for supper. Post Christmas is budget and food stretching time as we count down the days to the next tip masquerading as a pay cheque so lots of creative stuff is done in the kitchen. One of my favourite ways of stretching chicken is to make schnitzels and when they are combined with the Longhair’s brilliant mash and never fail microwave cheese sauce we have a meal fit for a king.
So off I went and started with the chicken schnitzels, but, in the back of my mind the lamb chops were calling for a bit of attention. That, coupled with the possibility of scoring mega points with the carnivore, persuaded me to give making lamb schnitzels a bash (Confession – I have never made lamb schnitzels before, so how hard can it be?).
The idea is always to experiment so you can substitute most of the ingredients below for your taste.
Ingredients:
- 4 lamb chops (that is all the lamb I had!)
- One egg
- Flour
- Add herbs and spices to the flour to taste – I used aromat, chicken spice, origanum, salt, pepper, sugar (it seems to crisp the coating up – at least that is my theory) *
- Mint
- Oil
- Knob of butter
* Other suggestions are fresh mint, parmesan, steak spice, garlic, curry etc.
Method:
- Trim chops of excess fat (leaving a small sliver adds to taste) – use trimmed fat to teach the dogs tricks and supplement their diet, in the absence of dogs try teach your kids tricks.
- Place each piece of meat between the cling wrap that the chops were covered in and moer with a rolling pin to flatten – just enough so that the meat can be removed in one piece.
- Sprinkle each schnitzel with dried mint.
- Cover a heavy based saucepan with oil and toss in a knob of butter (the butter makes all the difference). Make sure that the oil is hot but NOT sizzling – you don’t want to burn the butter or flour (which will leave ugly black bits).
- Dredge the lamb in the beaten egg, let egg drain and then coat with your flour mix and into pan.
- You don’t need to cook each schnitzel for long – just to brown on each side.
Serve with mash and a salad.
By the way we never told the Carnivore that his schnitzels were lamb and not chicken – it was only when he was halfway into his first one that he realised that he was eating red and not white meat – his smile of pleasure was reward enough.
Of course the next experiment is to try the lamb schnitzels with a different cut of meat or YOU could do so and report back in the comments section.
Time: 20 minutes
Feeds: 2 people
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