Today was Easter’s Eve. For this dinner we made Middle-Eastern Style Lamb Shanks along with Strawberry Shortcake and Fresh Pea Soup. Joke: What’s the difference between mashed potatoes and pea soup? You can mash potatoes but you can’t pea soup! HAHAHAHAHAHA. Back to food. We thought that with the pea soup we did not need a vegetable in our meal. (Correction: we were to lazy to make a vegetable.) Anyway, the lamb shanks were cooked two different ways- one had yogurt sauce and cooked in it and the other did not. Both were served over couscous. Here’s photos of the final meal:
The plated lamb shank.
Fresh pea soup
Strawberry shortcake
For the lamb shanks, we looked for inspiration in one of our favorite cook books by Mark Bittman. We decided on a recipe that called for browning the lamb shanks, then adding 10-20 cloves of garlic (!!) and 2 chopped onions. The recipe said to just let that cook in its own juices but ours looked dry so we added some chicken broth and, because we wanted to play soccer outside, we transferred it to our slow cooker so we wouldn’t have to watch it all the time. After 2 hours the lamb was falling off the bone. We skimmed the fat and then added 1 quart of plain yogurt with minced garlic mixed in (we took out two shanks and finished them in chicken broth, because we wanted to try it two ways).
Lamb recipe ingredients
Chopping onions
Browning the shanks
We added 15 gloves of garlic –no vampires in our house tonight
The plated lamb shank.
The pea soup was a very simple recipe. First, we melted butter in a pan and when it was melted, we added 1 chopped onion to the pan (if you have leeks, even better) . After the onions became translucent, we added vegetable broth. Then we added frozen peas and cooked for about 5 minutes. We blended it in a a blender and put it back into the pan until we were ready to serve it. You can also cool it and serve it cold. Either way its good with a dollop of sour cream and fresh chives.
Stirring the Peas into the pan.
After that we used a blender to … blend the peas into the soup!
Blender!
Then we plated the soup.
Plating the soup.
For dessert today we kinda did a *find what you have in you pantry and use* type of thing. As we looked around we found one of our favorite ingredients to use… Bisquick (its great for pancakes, waffles, biscuits…). We looked on all sides of the box and found one thing that seemed to be the best dessert for spring; strawberry shortcake. I made the batter for the short cakes and Max sliced and sugared the strawberries. (When we were ready to serve them, we would whip the cream).
Adding the ingredients for shortcakes using our new leveler teaspoon
Stirring the ingredients all together
In the oven!
Out of the oven!
My –Alex”s — dessert!
