Recipe Night #2

Today is Katy's birthday! Yay!

She unfortunately has class tonight, so last night we stayed in and I treated her to very easy and nice dinner. I used the opportunity to gice her her presents one by one.

Salad: Improvised
The stew had to simmer for 2 hours, so after I got it started I took to making the salad as an appetizer. I love making salads and am a big fan of the dressing-less variety, but you have to have juicy and flavorful things cut into very small or thinly sliced pieces (so that everything is more or less evenly blanketed) to pull it off. Your standard greens and tomatoes just isn't enough. So, my improvised salad contained the following:

- baby spinach (two salad bowls full)
- carrot (shaved) - I used a piece about half the size of my index finger. If you shave a carrot very thin, its moisture really comes out and adds something to the salad. A thick shaving will keep the carrot's hardy and jarring texture. Terrible for a salad.
- 5 prunes (sliced)
- 1/3 pear (thinly sliced) - ate the rest this morning
- half of a tomato (thinly sliced)
- pine nuts (half a handful)
- goat cheese (~1 oz.)
- black pepper (light)

This salad was very awesome. I could have eaten it for dinner, but as it was an appetizer it was perfect with our hardy Russian River Valley Chardonnay. I also served this in a beautiful salad bowl I found at Macy's on super duper clearance (present #1).


Entree: Lamb, Spinach and Couscous Soup

I picked this one because we had a lot of spinach at the house and a few handfuls of couscous left. The lamb was our only major purchase. We went to Whole Foods before hand and grabbed a 3 lb. lamb leg (the recipe called for lamb necks, but WTF), salad stuff, some beer, goat cheese, and we were good.

The recipe looked great, but as I started cooking I started to lose faith. As stews do I guess, it started very thin and wine heavy. Also the foam on top became gritty from the marrow leaching from the lamb leg bone.

Once we removed the lamb leg pieces from the initial broth to cut them into chunks all fears subsided. The lamb had a very distinctive flavor that was not just a leaching of flavor from the broth/wine and a very welcome change to your standard beef/chicken/pork rotation. I think recipe night is definitely going to make me branch out in the meat department.

Anyway, the result was a soup with a great consistency - much hardier that we had anticipated. The only thing I can say is that the soup does take a healthy amount of salt and that more than the 1/2 cup of couscous is too much.

Present #2 was a 6-quart copper-bottomed pan in which the stew was cooked - a theme of very useful kitchen stuffs. And present #3 was a dark wood hand-craved bowl that would have made a great bread bowl if I had remembered to pick up bread while we were at the store. D'oh.

Quinn had just been put down when the soup was done and cooling, so I set the table with linens and our nicer bowls for a intimate meal that really turned out great.

Happy Birthday Katy!