A picnic from your wildest dreams, by Giovanna Garzoni.
Recipe: Roast Lamb Sandwich with Ricotta and Caper Pesto
Pasquetta sounds wonderful to me. That’s Easter Monday, when Italians pack up a picnic lunch and head to the countryside to spread it all out under the Italian sun. We generally don’t have the weather for a Pasquetta picnic in New York, where I live, so this nice little celebration is out. Plus we don’t get the day off, so we’re doubly out of luck here.
Come to think of it, Americans generally don’t have picnics. We do barbecues, don’t we? I certainly didn’t grow up having any picnics on Long Island, but we had plenty of barbecues. Picnics are European. You can bring pâté to a picnic, and wine. There was, though, that William Inge play Picnic, which was made into a movie with William Holden as the handsome but creepy drifter who slips into town to cause trouble on Labor Day. Maybe in Kansas they have picnics.
If I lived in Italy and were packing up a big basket for Pasquetta, this is what I’d include (you’ve got to do something with all the leftover lamb). By the way, the painting above by Giovanna Garzoni is my idea of a great picnic. How can you go wrong with a spread that contains a scary dog, a dead bird, and a bunch of cardoons?
Happy Pasquetta to you.
Roast Lamb Sandwich with Ricotta and Caper Pesto
(Serves 2)
¼ cup salt-packed capers, soaked for 20 minutes and then rinsed
1 small garlic clove, peeled and roughly chopped
A small handful of flat-leaf parsley leaves
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper
½ a large baguette, sliced horizontally
6 good-size slices of roasted leg of lamb, not too rare, at room temperature
Salt
½ cup whole-milk ricotta (sheep’s milk, if you can find it)
A handful of baby arugula
Place the capers, garlic, parsley, olive oil, and a few grindings of black pepper in the bowl of a small food processor, and pulse to a rough paste.
Smear the insides of the baguette with a thin layer of caper pesto. Lay the lamb on the flat sides of the bread, and make a layer of ricotta on the rounded sides. Season the lamb with salt and black pepper, and top with the arugula. Close up the sandwiches, and wrap them in aluminum foil. Grab a cold bottle of Frascati and a pint of strawberries, and head for the warm sun.
Erica De Mane 
Your picnic sounds lovely. e do picnics in MN – but not in april – and yes – everyone’s back at school and work Easter Monday. Your way is much more civilized.
Sounds like a fabulous sandwich.
Here in Paris, the weather was sublime, for a change.
Wish I had read this before “lundi paques”, I’d have gathered up the fixins and headed to the park, rounding up a couple of neighborhood stragglers not en route for the countryside, and settled on down in my local park, Square Brassai in the Butte aux Cailles.
About those fixins, I have a couple of questions.
No doubt I could drum up some leftover lamb amongst my pals.
Plus an alternative ingredient for me, vegetarian. I would think some grilled eggplant, or some succulent mushroom would do. Hell, pretty much anything, even nothing else added would be good with that caper pesto, arugula & ricotta.
What do you think ?
The other question, I did not understand the “rounded side” and “flat side” precisions of the baguette assembly. Really I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass. Are you cutting the baguette crosswise or lengthwise ? As I am a great lover of form, could you elucidate ?
Biz,
Marieta
Marieta,
You know I had trouble trying to describe the bread. I hope it wasn’t terribly unclear. What I meant to say is that I start out cutting the bread lengthwise. The rounded side is the top side, which tends to be rounder because it puffs up in the oven. The flat side is the bottom side that gets flattened slightly by sitting on the oven floor (or on a sheet pan). Does that make sense? My original description was a bit clumsy.
Yes, grilled eggplant. That sounds the best. Excellent really. Even better than lamb. Lamb with eggplant with be great too.
Love to you,
Erica