Food Memories: The Best Lamb I Have Ever Eaten!

There have been many great meals I have had in my life, at least one for every food item you can suggest. This includes the best cocktails I have had as well as the coolest setting for my most memorable meals. One meal I have never been able to recreate was a lamb that was stuffed with onions, garlic, chili peppers and bell peppers and slathered with fresh salsa and wrapped in a wet burlap bag and buried in the Mojave desert in a deep pit lined with hot rocks that slowly cooked this wonderful lamb from dusk to dawn the next day and the resulting product tasted like heaven on earth. It was the most tender and flavorful lamb I have ever had to this day, some 30 years later. When the burlap wrapped parcel was dug up and the wrapping was taken off a magnificent piece of meat was unveiled. There were 20 people at the “fiesta” to celebrate life and the love of food and they were richly rewarded.  Besides the “fantastic” lamb there were side offerings of fresh sweet corn on the cob that had been slathered with spicy hot chili butter and wrapped in their own husks and buried on top of the lamb in the hot rocks for an hour, as well as fresh vegetables from the garden that had been lightly roasted and tossed with olive oil, vinegar and fresh herbs along with a fresh lettuce salad. We sat around a huge campfire and drank ice cold beer and margaritas made with fresh limes and gorged ourselves. This was a meal I wish I could recreate and one that I will never forget! I could recreate this meal if I had a large enough fire pit to as many rocks as are needed hot enough to bury with a whole lamb, these people did this dish o a regular basis so they were prepared for it. The fire pit was also equipped with a large rotissiere to barbeque whole turkeys and pigs on over hot coals, these were serious foodies and I am grateful I was invited to one of their shindigs!