Eating Dinner With My Family

My darling husband chose a lamb tagine tonight. It was great. I did have some trouble with the chestnuts; I assumed they were peeled and they weren't. Yeah, big pain in the butt!  I also have issues with the woody parts of pomegranate arils, but despite that, it was wonderful. My husband liked it at first, but with every bite, he grew more and more enamored with the dish.   If you haven't tried Moroccan food, you just have to!  Put it on your menu right now, I'll wait, go on, do it. :). Moroccan food does have a lot going on flavor wise, but it's magical how all the pungent, salty, sweet flavors just work.  Now that I have built it up, I'm going to add a but...  But, since I have set your expectations so high, it can't meet them right?  And, but, you also need to be mindful of how our minds deal with new flavors. New flavors are interpreted often as bad. An unexpected boon from doing all these new recipes was that we are training our brains to have new mea...

I thought I would surprise my husband with another tagine tonight.  He could not stop raving about how awesome the Lamb Tagine with Dates, Almonds and Pistachios was, so I thought another was in order.  I wanted to do one that wasn't quite as sweet.  I picked this one.  I happened to really like it, as much as the last one, my husband thought it was good, but preferred the sweeter first one.  I did have one small issue, I didn't have any couscous!  Now it was recommended to eat this with a bread for scooping up, but as I am not a baker, and I assumed I still had couscous, I didn't shop or plan for anything beyond the tagine itself.  Fast forward to the end of the cooking time for the tagine, and I am getting ready to make the couscous that I discover I don't have.  My husband suggests that we throw in the butternut dumplings we had earlier in the week.  So, I throw those in for about 15 minutes just to heat them up.  It worked, but next...

I got the most beautiful tagine as a gift from my MIL.  I have been wanting one for a long time.  Now I am not timid in the kitchen, but I was a little nervous about using the clay vessel with the glass top stove, so after a bit of poking around on the Internet, I ordered a heat diffuser and a cookbook about cooking in these clay vessels.   The heat diffuser was recommended by the makers of my tagine but didn't say required, but I figured for 12 dollars it was worth the insurance.  I should have checked to see if my tagine fit inside my cast iron skillet, but too late:).  This is my first recipe out of the cookbook I ordered Tagines & Couscous .  If this recipe is the only one we like, the book was worth it.  We had some wonderful friends over, who didn't mind being guinea pigs to our first attempt with the tagine as well as the recipe;).  The only ingredient that I couldn't find at my local publix was the ghee.  The cookbook ...

OMG, what a total pain in the butt, and dang it if it wasn't really delicious.  We were trying out this recipe we had at Restaurant Marrakesh in EPCOT and got from their cookbook.  I was a bit annoyed at it's vague instructions.  (it's an ounce by volume not weight FYI) and no instructions on how to substitute phyllo dough for the bastilla leaf but my annoyance faded at the tasting.  It was great.  Super great!  I have never been a fan of sweet and savory, but this recipe makes me a believer.  The sweet, cinnamony meat in the crisp shell is perfect.  I love Moroccan food and this is a perfect example of why it is so wonderful.  The rolling of it is fraught with annoyance and curse words but all is forgotten by the time you taste it! YUM Beef Brewat 1 lb Ground Beef 1/2 md Onion,Diced 1 oz Cilantro,Chopped 1 oz Parsley,Chopped 1/2 t  Cinnamon 1 pn Ginger 1 pn Saffron 1 t  Salt 2    Egg,Whipped 1 oz Peanut ...