20 April - Easter Dinner
Apr. 21st, 2014 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fenchurchOne nice side effect of having my brother-in-law come over to help with the couch on Saturday was that it actually occurred to us that we should invite him over for Easter dinner on Sunday (his wife is currently out of town, so he's on his own for the moment). Of course, it was only later that we realized we had absolutely no plans in place for what wanted to cook for said dinner! We did a bit of brainstorming while driving home late Saturday night after returning the rental truck, stopped by a grocery store to pick up a couple of things for side dishes and decided to pretty much wing it on the main dish, using stuff we already had at home.
We started out checking the freezer and found a package of lamb shoulder... did some quick online searching and came up with a recipe for Moroccan Slow-Cooked Lamb that looked pretty incredible. However, neither of us really felt like going through the effort that the recipe required... so, we followed the first part of the instructions, with a slight change (we discovered on Sunday that we had no fennel seed, so instead I popped some seeds out of the star anise we had on hand and ground them up in the spice grinder - not the same, but it did give a similar licorice flavor and aroma). We browned up the lamb and then tossed it in the crockpot... followed the instructions a bit more with the onion and tomato paste, before tossing that and most of the remaining ingredients in the crockpot with the rest.
The changes we made at that point were because we discovered we were missing a few of the ingredients that we'd assumed we had on hand... in particular, I'd apparently used up all of our garbanzo beans making hummus a few weeks ago. Oops. We left them out entirely and I didn't really miss them. We chopped up the dried apricots (they were ones we'd dried ourselves and had been storing in the freezer), used several tomatoes-on-the-vine instead of plum tomatoes, used lime zest instead of lemon (we normally always have lemons and almost never have limes... not sure how we ended up with just limes) and tossed in a few cubes of frozen minced ginger (one of the best inventions EVER).
We stuck the slow cooker on high and let everything cook through the afternoon, turning it down to low about an hour before dinner and then serving it over whole wheat couscous cooked in chicken stock and a sprinkling of fresh cilantro on top, with steamed broccoli (and grated Pecorino Romano) and fresh watermelon on the side. We'll definitely be doing that lamb dish again... and in the crockpot, because it turned out so well and was a whole lot less work than it needed to be. Not too shabby for something thrown together sort of last minute (or at least about as last minute as you can get with a slow cooker).
Crossposted from my Livejournal.
We started out checking the freezer and found a package of lamb shoulder... did some quick online searching and came up with a recipe for Moroccan Slow-Cooked Lamb that looked pretty incredible. However, neither of us really felt like going through the effort that the recipe required... so, we followed the first part of the instructions, with a slight change (we discovered on Sunday that we had no fennel seed, so instead I popped some seeds out of the star anise we had on hand and ground them up in the spice grinder - not the same, but it did give a similar licorice flavor and aroma). We browned up the lamb and then tossed it in the crockpot... followed the instructions a bit more with the onion and tomato paste, before tossing that and most of the remaining ingredients in the crockpot with the rest.
The changes we made at that point were because we discovered we were missing a few of the ingredients that we'd assumed we had on hand... in particular, I'd apparently used up all of our garbanzo beans making hummus a few weeks ago. Oops. We left them out entirely and I didn't really miss them. We chopped up the dried apricots (they were ones we'd dried ourselves and had been storing in the freezer), used several tomatoes-on-the-vine instead of plum tomatoes, used lime zest instead of lemon (we normally always have lemons and almost never have limes... not sure how we ended up with just limes) and tossed in a few cubes of frozen minced ginger (one of the best inventions EVER).
We stuck the slow cooker on high and let everything cook through the afternoon, turning it down to low about an hour before dinner and then serving it over whole wheat couscous cooked in chicken stock and a sprinkling of fresh cilantro on top, with steamed broccoli (and grated Pecorino Romano) and fresh watermelon on the side. We'll definitely be doing that lamb dish again... and in the crockpot, because it turned out so well and was a whole lot less work than it needed to be. Not too shabby for something thrown together sort of last minute (or at least about as last minute as you can get with a slow cooker).
Crossposted from my Livejournal.
