I adore lamb shanks - even as a child. When I eat them gray clouds depart, the rain stops and on occasion I hear music. I love them that much. In a perfect world they are small, less than a pound but better closer to three quarters of a pound. They ideally come from the front leg and are called fore shanks, not the pseudo/imposter shank cut off the rear leg.
They need to be browned in a small amount of olive oil and braised slowly in stock or water to release their rustic flavor and to make them melt into tenderness. My mother always braised them in garlic, oregano, onions and chopped whole tomatoes. It was the scent of our home growing up. She’d slowly braise them on the stove for at least an hour and then placed the shanks onto raw rice and ladled the remaining liquid on top and baked them covered in the oven. When you could smell the rice, it was done but it still needed to rest for 15 more long minutes.
Our mother used ‘Greek rice.’ Lord only knows what that was. My guess is that it was long grain Basmati rice from India. No one ate much rice in Maine in those days. Our mother and my sister and I went on food shopping trips once a month to Boston. She’d order up a taxi from the doorman at the Parker House Hotel to take us to the less-safe area of Boston and have the taxi wait while we filled our shopping cart with small brown bags of ‘Greek rice’, tins of finely ground Arabic coffee for our father, pounds of feta cut from a wooden barrel, big plastic bags of Kalamata and Alfonzo olives, whole milk yogurt with a creamy top, a few long boxes of phyllo dough, dried oregano and large non-boxed heads of garlic, a tin of Greek olive oil, tiny capers and still warm spinach pies.
The thing I remember most about baking oatmeal cookies when I was 8 years old was that the bottoms always burned. Even if you faithfully followed the recipe on the back of the Quaker Oats box to a tee, which I absolutely did, when you pulled the sheet out of the oven, slid your spatula under that first lightly browned mound and peered hopefully at its underside, all you got was burned.
Monday, mid morning, I found my five year old Sara, in the kitchen, 
My
dad lived part-time in Sag Harbor and made the drive from the city
every weekend in every type of weather. I would visit him and my
stepmother every summer, and we’d stay put for the weekend, usually
poolside. My dad and I would swim back and forth and read books and
nap. He would do his Sunday puzzle and I would nudge him for clues; I
would read books he gave me and he would nudge me about which part I
was up to. Because to me, my dad was part Phillip Roth and part John
Updike, I read Phillip Roth and John Updike. Because we both loved to
punctuate the headier reading with murder mysteries, he would toss me
his copies of Lee Child or Lawrence Block, and I would gobble them up
like candy. I still have the water swollen copy of Annie Proulx’s Shipping
News that he accidentally tossed into the water in order to save
me from a hovering bee, and I remember how he had said he envied my
getting to read it for the first time.
