Harissa Lamb, Tabbouleh and Tzatziki
I’m not sure where the inspiration for this came from but last night’s Masterchef contestants worked in the kitchen of a Middle-Eastern restaurant so it may have been that.
I marinated the lamb pieces (from two leg steaks) in harissa for about an hour before assembling them on skewers and grilling them for about three minutes either side.
We served the lamb with tabbouleh and tzatziki which I forgot to take a picture of. The tzatziki was just Greek yogurt, lemon juice, garlic, grated cucumber and mint. The tabbouleh was just our usual recipe.
It was a good dish, the heat of the harissa was well balanced by the coolness of the tzatziki and the tabbouleh added another level of freshness. I think the lamb would work well barbecued so the outside could char slightly.
Thai Green Curry
We cooked green curry almost every week for a while, but haven’t done so for some time and decided to end the green curry drought today. We had bought the ingredients when we were in Chinatown on Saturday, so this evening when I got home from work I started preparing the paste.
I managed to resist the urge to start bashing things in the mortar and pestle immediately and took my time to measure and chop all the ingredients beforehand so that they would be ready to bash when their turn came. As a result, they were all laid out on a couple of plates, so I took a picture. Next time I’ll try to get some of those little glass bowls and bottom-heavy shot glasses that seem so popular for ingredients on shows such as Saturday Kitchen.
The ingredients are, sort of from left to right, front to back: lemongrass, galangal, lime zest, shallots, coriander root, garlic, cumin, coriander seed, black pepper, salt, green chilli. These were all bashed into a paste of course, and then we started cooking the curry. Traditionally, these curries don’t contain much in the way of vegetables; maybe some small aubergines if you’re feeling adventurous, but we always put in loads of vegetables. Today we had baby corn (a staple of ours), sliced red and yellow peppers and purple sprouting broccoli.
The result had a lovely deep flavour with just enough chilli kick without completely setting our mouths on fire. Needed a dash of salt, but that was minor. Served with jasmine rice.
Slow-Roasted Shoulder of Lamb
Yesterday, we had decided that today we should have some roast lamb. We were in the market for half a leg of lamb when we arrived at our local butcher yesterday, but we ended up taking half a shoulder instead because there was one on display and we couldn’t remember having cooked shoulder before.
So when we got home, we had a look for some recipes. Most of the recipes for shoulder of lamb required the shoulder to be boned and cut up: these weren’t the recipes that we were looking for. Eventually, we came across a Jamie recipe that involved roasting the lamb for four hours with garlic and rosemary and then making sauce out of the juices by adding stock, mint and capers. This sounded very good indeed, so this is what we did.
The recipe said to put the joint in a roasting dish and then cover it with foil. The sounded rather like a faux-rustic Jamieism, so instead we opted to cook it properly, in a casserole dish with a lid, which worked out rather well. The fattiness of the shoulder cut combined with the length of cooking time resulted in lamb that tasted a bit like lamb confit: rich and fully flavoured. Some of the lamb had gone crispy on the outside while the inside remained succulent, giving a lovely contrast.
We served this with lemony leeks, mashed swede, mashed potato and steamed cabbage. It all went together brilliantly; the minty-and-capery sauce was just the thing to accompany the succulent, rich lamb and went well with the vegetables too.
Five Things About Us
First off, let me talk about this picture. Having finished writing this post I realised that I didn’t have a picture to go with it and I’m not keen on posts without pictures, they look out-of-place compared to all the other posts and less interesting. I thought I’d have a hunt around for an interesting picture that we hadn’t used before and remembered that we took lots of photographs for our Christmas cards this year. As I was searching for those I came across this picture and I have absolutely no idea what it is. It’s dated 03.12.07 so I looked back at our post from that day to check but we didn’t publish this picture or make any reference to it. I can only imagine it was something that went wrong and we decided not to mention it (we don’t do that often as we’re keen on being warts-and-all) so I’m stumped. Answers on a postcard if you have any idea!
Ok, back to the matter in hand. We’ve been tagged three times for this meme by:
Su-Lin at Tamarind and Thyme
Donald at Mr Orph’s Kitchen
Pixie at You Say Tomahto, I Say Tomayto.
The rules are:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 5 facts about yourself
3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them)
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their Blogs
1. We chose our pseudonyms because in the same week we started Dinner Diary I realised one of my life’s ambitions: to own a Stephen flour shaker. Kerri makes up the other half of the very famous dancing couple and is also a commonly used spice. Genius!
2. Stephen holds the WSET Advanced Certificate in Wines and Spirits and is soon to embark on the diploma.
3. My earliest food memory is eating cold baked beans from a tin in the first house I ever lived in, I think I was two years old. Baked beans are probably my most hated food now and I can’t even be in the same room as someone who’s eating them.
4. Stephen is strongly considering entering Masterchef next year (I’m too scared).
5. We regularly dream of opening a pub/restaurant so that the many hours we spend thinking and talking about food can one day become our real jobs. In reality, we’re both worried about getting fat and drinking too much so will stick to our day jobs of marketing (me) and programming (Stephen).
I tag:
Claire at Claire’s Cake Bake
Jules at Domestic Goddess In Training
Penny at Penelope’s Pantry
Antonia at Food, Glorious Food
Niamh at Eat Like A Girl
Cheesecake
Two of my colleagues had birthdays this weekend which coincided nicely with my discovery of Pixie’s cheesecake recipe. As regular readers will know, baking isn’t really my forte but this year I’m determined to master at least one good dessert. We don’t have a food mixer but I checked with Pixie and she confirmed that this should be simple enough to do by hand. I gathered all my ingredients (after exhaustingly checking the quality of the ginger biscuits) and set to work. She was right, combining the sugar with the other ingredients was simple to do by hand and everything seemed to go well.
I mentioned to Stephen this morning that I’d planned on making this to take to work and he seemed disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to try it so I made a smaller version for us to eat after dinner. We haven’t tried it yet but boy was the filling good!
Soup
We make a fair amount of soup but rarely blog about it, I think it’s because generally it goes straight into a Tupperware ready to go to work for lunches and we don’t photograph it. Today’s offering, as is so often the case, was born out of lots of leftover vegetables lurking in the bottom of the fridge.
I roasted off some red and yellow peppers with various types of tomato, some celery leaves, a red onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, half a red chilli and some salt and pepper. When they were just charred I transferred them to a saucepan and added some vegetable stock before blitzing the whole lot together. There’s probably only about two portions there but they’ll be fine for lunches this week.
Mozarella and Roasted Peppers
We haven’t done very much in the way of cooking this week and unfortunately this weekend wasn’t much of an exception. We cooked spaghetti bolognaise on Friday night which was lovely but not very original or photogenic. We went out for both lunch and dinner on Saturday; lunch at Hummus Bros on Wardour Street (an interesting concept but I didn’t much like the hummus) and dinner at our local tapas bar in the evening where we ate Jamon, Machego, whitebait and calamari.
After gathering together the necessary ingredients for today’s dinner we had a quick lunch of brown bread, Mozarella and roasted peppers. It was really good but I think we could have made better peppers – we bought these from Waitrose.
Steamed Barramundi and Stir Fried Vegetables
Kerri was out tonight and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to eat, so I just picked things up as I wandered around the supermarket. As I was doing so, I realised I quite fancied vegetables and fish, so I ended up making stir fried vegetables and steaming some fish to go with it. I wandered up and down the fish counter and eventually chose barramundi (which came from here), because I don’t remember ever having it before.
I stir fried purple sprouting broccoli, thinly sliced red pepper, onion, garlic, ginger, spring onion and shitake mushrooms, adding some soy sauce, oyster sauce and Chinese cooking wine. The result was good but a little sweet; possibly too much oyster sauce. I marinated the fish in soy sauce, lime juice and garlic and then steamed it. The fish was good and remained moist, with the flavours of the marinade penetrating it almost well enough; could have done with some more time.
Pasta
Last night we had a quick dinner of pasta with roasted tomatoes, rocket, smoked bacon and parmesan. It was an idea that developed on my journey home and was loosely inspired by this recipe. It didn’t work quite as well unfortunately, probably due to the lack of pesto but with a little work I think it could become a good mid-week meal.
Guinea Fowl
We’ve cooked guinea fowl a few times before but only as part of another dish; casserole or pie usually. While I was at the butcher last week I noticed they had some lovely looking guinea fowl so we decided to have one for dinner this evening.
We started by browning the guinea fowl and removing it a plate. Next we fried off some streaky bacon before adding some onion, celery and garlic and sweating it for about ten minutes. We added the guinea fowl back to the casserole dish and threw in some carrots and leek, a bay leaf and some sage, a splash of white wine and also some chicken stock. We brought it to the boil and then transferred it to the oven where it cooked for about an hour and fifteen minutes.
We served it with some green cabbage, mashed potatoes and mashed swede. It was a great dish, easy to prepare and full of flavour. While cooking it had a gamey smell to it but this disappeared by the time the dish was finished.
It struck me while we were eating that this is a great alternative to chicken; it’s slightly smaller and has a stronger flavour but I think it would work well in place of chicken.
