Last Sunday night, Lou and I hosted six other folks for dinner before playing bridge. We made a gruyere and fontina fondue (with french bread, asparagus and cherry tomatoes for dipping), rack of lamb with a preserved lemon gremolata crust served over a bed of spicy chili nodles, and for dessert, our friend Joey, baked a delicious chocolate espresso cake.
The lamb recipe came from Donna Hay's "New Fast Food," and she lived up to our expectations of her spectacular recipes. We modified the recipe slightly by matching the lamb with the spicy noodles (basically we exchanged noodles for potatoes), and it turned out well.
Here's the modified recipe for the lamb:
Ingredients:
for the lamb:
sea salt
olive oil
1 lamb rack of 12 cutlets, trimmed of fat
for the preserved lemon gremolata:
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
2/3 cup flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1 1/2 tablespoons chopped preserved lemon
2 tablespoons olive oil
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
Place a frying pan over high heat. Add the lamb and cook for 3 minutes or until the meat is sealed. Remove from the pan and set aside.
To make the preserved lemon gremolata, combine the garlic, parslep, preserved lemon and oil. Spread the gremolata over the lamb and place in a baking dish. Bake for 12-15 minutes or until the lamb is cooked to your liking.
To serve, slice the rack into cutlets.
Hay suggests shielding the gremolata from the heat with tin foil, but I thought the gremolata might have looked better a little browned. Next time I may put the lamb under the broiler for a minute or two. I also wonder if browning the gremolata might help it better adhere to the lamb.
On Valentine's Day, Lou and I made spinach gnocchi. Here's the recipe:
Making gnocchi is a four step process in which you prepare the basic ingridients, combine them with flour to form a dough, drop the dough in boiling water and then bake it in butter and cheese.
I was thrilled about how they turned out. They were softer than I expected, and they tasted delicious.
Here you can see us mixing the dough and preparing them for the boiling water:
And lastly, on Friday night we cooked some beets (you can see the beets in the pot just before we pulled them out) and made egg rolls. Donna Hay again supplied us with the idea for egg rolls. It could not have been easier:
Egg Rolls
2 tablespoons sesame oil
4 green onions, chopped (we used part of a larger onion because we didn't have any green onions)
4 eggs (we used up the remaining quail eggs--about 12 in all)
fillings (Hay suggests smoked salmon, spinach ot tomatoes, but we used prosciutto)
thick, sweet soy sauce
Heat the seame oil in a large, non-stick pan over medium heat. Add the onions and cook for 2 minutes. Remove half the onions and set aside.
Beat the eggs lightly to combine them. Add half the egg to the pan and swirl to evenly coat the base. Cook for 2-3 minutes or until almost set. Slide the egg from the pan and place the fillings of your choice down one side. Roll up and serve with thick soy sauce. Return the remaining onions to the pan and make a second egg roll. Serves 2.
It had been years since I'd seen an egg rolls like these. My aunt and uncle lived in Japan for a year when I was a kid, and I remember my aunt making them for us when they got back to the US. I've grown accustom to the crispy egg rolls served in most chinese restaurants, and I had honestly forgotten that you can make an egg roll like thin omlette and roll it up with tasty fillings to your own liking. I thought ours turned out slightly too thick, so the next time I make them I want to try to make the egg layer as thin as possible. Here's a photo sequence of me rolling them up.
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