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...

Don't let the length of the recipe daunt you!  It was less of a process than it appears, and even if it was difficult, it was pretty much worth it.  If I were to make any criticism of it at all was that the reduced braising liquid was still pretty runny and the sandwich was a huge dripping mess.  Correction a huge, dripping, tasty mess.  My husband wanted something crunchy in the sandwich, but that didn't stop him from having 2 ;).  We all agreed it was a solid 4 stars.  The only possibly difficult ingredient to procure is the pomegranate molasses.  If you can't find it locally, you can get it on line but I made my own.   I had made it for a Lebanese fried fish  ages ago, and finished it off tonight in this Shawarma.  The tahini sauce was wonderful and I am looking forward to having it on my sandwich at lunch tomorrow. Braised Lamb Shawarma For the lamb 4 bone-in lamb shoulder chops (about 10 -oz. each) 1 Tbs. vegetable oil mor...

Having pomegranate molasses from last night's recipe, I decided to pull out this one from my to try file that has been passed up because I didn't have the molasses.  I hate to get an ingredient with only one use for it.  Well unlike in school house rock, it seems two was the magic number.  This one was vastly superior to last night's dinner.  My only complaint was with mother nature.  I did not enjoy the woody aspect of the pomegranate arils.  Loved the tart pop but that woody crunch after was a texture issue for me.  I kept thinking that I was getting a fish bone.  I learned to work with it and over the course of dinner, I found myself enjoying it more and more.  The flavor of the fish was awesome.  I even enjoyed the mint.  I usually have an issue with mint in savory dishes. Pom egranate-Glazed Salmon With Armenian Rice Salmon 2 T  soy sauce 1 T  extra-virgin olive oil 1 T  fresh lemon juice 1...

This dinner was a split decision.  I liked it somewhat and thought it was good enough to try and fix the issues we had with it.  My son loved the fish, but my husband didn't.  My husband thought the rice was the star, the carbohydrate kid, not so much.  The little girl liked the fish too.  I loved that this recipe was a real challenge on the ingredient guessing game.  The boy beat the husband by one.  I will admit when it came to the spice blend, I gave hints;).  I just want to advocate again that the ingredient guessing game is a great meal time activity.  It can be played by any age, it's fun (really it is, not just for food geeks:) and connects the diner with the meal and the process of cooking it. Ok back to the meal... It was a bit of a laborious pain.  The pomegranate molasses took way longer thant AB said it would in his recipe.  You can buy it, but why? It's $$$$ and hard to find.  I did it the day before.  I...