Best wishes to you all for a joyous New Year’s Eve and a wonderful 2010.
Tomorrow we’re off for a three day duck extravaganza in the San Juan Islands with cook, teacher, and cassoulet/confit expert Kate Hill. Wish us luck!
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so long, 2009
Thursday, December 31st, 2009all-day braised lamb
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
After the usual holiday diet of chocolate, too much coffee and a lot of salami and cheese, it’s always a good idea to have something solid in mind for dinner. I can hardly imagine a more perfect dish for Christmas day than long-braised leg of lamb. Get it going after breakfast, peek at it occasionally throughout the day, pull it out in time for dinner. The only downside is that it takes up oven space that you might want for, say, baking pie, but the braise can easily be moved to the stovetop (which is what we ended up doing).
The lamb braises in a wine-tomato-stock mixture, but then you get to fill in the space around it with whatever veg you like. The original recipe recommends turnips, onions and carrots; we left out the onions and threw in parsnip and fennel. The long, slow braising makes the vegetables incredibly tender while still retaining their shape, so they can be scooped out of the broth and served alongside the meat.
images from Christmas
Monday, December 28th, 2009
Christmas is over and done with, and I would be back at work today if I weren’t home sick with a sinus headache and the sniffles. In my next post I’ll tell you about the six-hour braised lamb we made for Christmas dinner, but in the meantime here are some pictures from our weekend. Hope yours was fun as well!
we wish you a Merry Christmas…
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
…and a wonderful weekend to all.
a dinner that couldn’t be beat
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
In case you were wondering, here’s what Thanksgiving dinner looked like (on my plate, at least – there were a few more marshmallows and schnecken on other people’s plates). My husband’s relatives always put on a tremendous do, and this year was no exception.
I ended up with mashed potatoes, turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, challah, creamed spinach, stuffing, and a hefty spoonful of the roasted vegetables that my brother-in-law and I prepared earlier in the day (fennel, onion, mushrooms, beets, sweet potatoes, parsnips, and carrots).
And, of course, there was pie.
What goes on your Thanksgiving plate?
happy Thanksgiving
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
It’s Thanksgiving Day here in the States, time to roast vegetables and cream spinach and carve turkeys and yell at football on television. Hope you all have a good one!
squash noodle
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
My original plan for Halloween dinner was to try a recipe for sweet potato gnocchi from the penultimate issue of Gourmet (sigh), but the little sugar pie pumpkin that I bought at Gordon’s was looking at me reproachfully. Right. I put off the gnocchi in favor of a sort-of repeat of last year’s pumpkin ravioli. Why did I think it would be less painful this time?
the rain’s on the pumpkin
Friday, October 30th, 2009
gearing up for the Fourth
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
‘Tis the weekend for barbecued ribs and potato salad. And it actually looks like the weather is going to be beautiful for the Fourth of July, can you believe it? Of course, the mosquitoes have been hellish this week. We’ll have to smoke them out with the grill.
Or just plan on hunkering inside and eating lots of potato salad. We’ll see how it goes.
What’s on your Fourth of July menu?
the curried egg
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
For those who have not had a large Rubbermaid container of leftover curried eggs to work through this week, and are therefore not completely burned out on them, here’s a recipe (I omitted to include it in my Easter brunch report, obviously a mistake).
Ideally, this should be done with freshly found Easter eggs, wet with dew, delivered to the kitchen by victorious children, anxious to get back out into the fray. The finished dish will be ready by the time all the hunting is done, assuming you’ve begun the prep beforehand.
If you have no children or Easter eggs available, however, you can boil eggs just for this purpose. You could even make them sometime other than Easter. I won’t tell.
…Continue reading the curried egg
