I got home on Friday night for SPRING BREAK! It is SO great to be home again. After being able to watch Maryland
BEAT DUKE on the airplane home, and a slight delay due to the weather in Chicago, I was so happy to see my brother Louis heading towards me in our beat up old car.
Anyway, that entire introductory paragraph was IRRELEPHANT! <Elephants are my favorite animal> So my mom and I have been cooking dinner together for the past few nights. The dish we tried was a kind of pulled lamb. My mom and dad bought a baby lamb with my aunt and it was raised on a farm. It was then killed and butchered for a delicious dinner. (That was kind of sadistic sounding, but go with it...) We made a dry rub with fresh ground spices (it turned into more of a paste actually). Anyway, I was able to pull the lamb off the bone, and we had a delicious dinner of pulled lamb and roasted veggies, as well as as nice simple salad with Black Kale. The recipe is
here, but these are the changes we made:
1. Didn't use ancho chilies, instead used 1 T. medium-hot chili powder
2. Reduce the amount of salt used. Use about 1/2-1 t instead of 1 T. It was VERY salty.
It was so good. On the side we served the harissa (the paste-like supposed dry rub, mentioned above), but it was insanely salty for this dish. Reducing the amount of salt used will help this.
The vegetables are as follows:
1. Carrot
2. Sweet Potato
3. Potato
4. Onion
3. Salt & pepper
4. Olive Oil
5. Cumin
Coat the veggies in olive oil and sprinkle liberally with the salt and pepper, add the cumin as per your taste. For us 1/2t pepper, 1/4t salt, and 1-2t of cumin. Put all of this on a sheet pan and roast in the oven at 325 until fork tender. This was about an hour, but make sure to keep an eye on these. It could be more or less depending on the oven!
The yogurt dip on the side (listed with the lamb recipe above) complimented this dish so well. I put it on everything (the salad, the veggies, the lamb. Literally, everything). One note, I completely omitted the olive oil in the yogurt. It ended up not needing it, and was going to create an excess of oil in the dish. It was just as delicious without it.
Really Long Side Bar coming up: Black Kale is AMAZING. It is my new favorite vegetable. Take your kale, and cut the dead, dry ends off. Then cut it into strips about 1 inch thick. I put the kale into a lettuce spinner to rinse it off. Put the kale in your salad bowl and add a few dashes of olive oil (1T) and the juice of about 1/2 a lemon. Add this to your kale and massage, yes I said massage, your kale. Work in the olive oil and lemon juice and make sure you actually squeeze the kale leaves. We then added arugula, spinach, and mixed greens as well as sliced almonds and dried cherries. Also, you will need more olive oil and lemon juice. Just how much is up to you, just enough to dress your salad as you would like.
The final thing we made was a garlic naan. Trader Joe's has some excellent frozen naan, regular or garlic. The purpose of the naan is to make a sandwich/roll up thing with the lamb and yogurt and some greens, if you so please. Because I can't eat the bread I just kind of mixed the whole thing together and ate a delicious mish-mosh of yumminess.
For dessert, my mom bought me a cute gluten free cheesecake at our local supermarket. I had some frozen mixed berries, so I stuck them in the microwave to make a syrup-y concoction that went well with the New York Style cake.
Sunday night we made a kind of Mexican Shepard's pie. It was...interesting. The recipe, which I actually am unsure if it is the exact same one we used, can be found here. (We have a thing in my family where if a recipe is bad we just throw it away. Well, my brother didn't really like it, so it got tossed. I loved it...) It is basically a ground meat and tomato based dish with a sweet potato puree as a topper. It was actually pretty good, although the sweet potatoes became a kind of mushy mess, similar to baby food from a jar. My mom was being creative and played with a pastry bag (HEY! That's my job!) and did a fancy topper with the potatoes. You don't have to do the same thing, you can just spread them on top. Also, we left out the Worcestershire sauce by mistake, but I am not really sure if that had much of an affect. Another change, if you use regular potatoes it might turn out with a sturdier topping to it. The last change that was made was using 2T Gluten Free flour instead of the normal flour used. When using a little flour for a thickener, you can just substitute your flour 1:1. If doing something like baking, look up a ratio online.
