Mushroom mania

I need to learn to moderate my ambitions. One complex recipe is enough for a meal. Two or three just lead to stress and mistimings.

Thankfully, Antonia stepped up and offered to be my sous-chef. She did a marvelous job, other than putting the tarragon and parsley in the wrong dish. Oh well.

I didn't look at the cooking times closely enough in the beginning, so I started with the four vegetable soup. I had to make the broth first -- carrot, celery, onions, shallot, leek, garlic, thyme, pepper, parsley. Rather than the canned chicken broth that the recipe called for, I used some of Darien's homemade vegetable broth made from leftover trimmings from various meals. After the broth was made, I added the potatoes, leeks, peas, and spinach. I had to cut up some more tarragon and parsley, after my sous-chef's misappropriation.

Antonia actually did most of the preparation for the main dish, a mushroom risotto. It called for over a pound of crimini mushrooms, in addition to a dried porcini (which Darien couldn't find, so she found a nice substitute). I should have started on this dish first, since I had to keep adding liquid, stirring, and cooking until the Arborio rice was plump and tender. The Parmesan and fresh parsley at the end were nice additions.

The last dish was a fresh broccoflower salad. What really made this dish was the tart dressing -- oil mixed with a yellow hard boiled yolk, garlic, and sherry vinegar. The broccoli was tossed with watercress, scallions, celery, pimento olives, capers, parsley, and the remainder of the egg.

I didn't have everything ready to go at once, so some things had to sit while the rest of the dishes caught up. After having eaten spoonfuls of rice as it was cooking, I was no longer in the mood for bread, so I dropped that from the menu. I also realized that rice in the risotto and potatoes in the soup was probably not the wisest decision. The meal was still tasty, however, and afforded us plenty of leftovers.

Peter's special meal

Peter was coming home for spring break, so I decided to try and make him something. I initially wanted a crock pot recipe, but wasn't coming up with anything that appealed to me, so I settled on a shish kabob. I selected lamb since we don't have it often, and built the rest of the dishes around that.

I diced the lamb and then marinaded it for 24 hours in yogurt, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, cilantro, minced garlic, curry powder, and ground black pepper. But before the meat was even ready for grilling, disaster loomed. Peter's ride to South Carolina got complicated, and he decided not to come home. Like any good chef, I improvised. I invited the Speckled Bird over instead and the dinner proceeded.

The next evening the rest of the meal went together fairly easily. I started with the cucumber salad, since I had to leach much of the liquid out by salting the pieces and weighting them down in a colander for three hours. The bismati rice pilaf called for cardamom pods, which I didn't have, so I substituted powder, the only real variation I had to make. The cloves and cinnamon stick that I cooked in gave the rice an unusual flavor. While the pilaf cooked, I finished up the salad with a yogurt dressing, adding oil, mint, cumin, and garlic. Antonia cut up some fresh vegetables I had purchased. I rubbed oil on them and added some mint, then grilled them in a basket next to the lamb. I had some mini whole wheat pita pockets that I wrapped in foil and warmed up in the barbecue to complete the meal.

After dinner, the band broke the silence of the lamb and practiced in the front room. I think this was my best meal yet, both for the food and the company. Next time, Peter, you better come home when you say you will. I only have a few of these up my sleeve.

Bleeting of the lambs

Darien ordered two lamb loin chops through our winter CSA, Fall Line Farms. Although they were small cuts of meat, I decided to build my meal around them. I selected dishes and ingredients that reminded of Mediterranean cultures. The lamb chops themselves were browned and then cooked in a mixture of chopped tomatoes, onions, garlic, chopped kalamata olives, onions, red wine, rosemary, and parsley. The other main dish was a rice pilaf, but instead of making it the way Darien usually does with vermicelli, I added currants and toasted pine nuts, spiced up with cinnamon and turmeric. Darien suggested that for the liquid I use her homemade vegetable broth, which she has begun making by tossing all of her leftover odds and ends into a pot for boiling, and then freezing the mixture. It gave the pilaf a more flavorful, richer taste.

For my vegetable, I roasted asparagus. What made this special was a balsamic vinegar reduction, which was very easy to make. I dribbled on the reduction after roasting the spears, then followed with some virgin olive oil and grated Parmesan cheese.

Finally, I made a spinach salad with fresh white mushrooms. The recipe called for stale bread, which  I didn't have, but found I could pop some bread in a low heat oven and get a similar effect. I fried the bread in hot olive oil to make my croutons, then used the remnants of the oil to saute some minced garlic and whisked in the juice from two fresh lemons for the dressing.

I had most of the ingredients on hand, so I had little shopping to do for this meal. I thought the different dishes worked well together. No part was in itself difficult, but keeping everything going and on schedule was a two hour trial. For such a meal as this, a larger stove would have been helpful. I feel sorry for the one who had to wash dishes after dinner.