Tonight we celebrated the arrival of spring–it’s finally warm out! We prepared (spring) lamb chops, ramps, couscous and a spinach/arugula salad with avocado, chickpeas, tomatoes and parmesan cheese. I (Alex) also prepared an appetizer with sauteed chicken liver because I wanted to try cooking them. Liver is kind of weird looking. For dessert we had a lot of starburst candy that mom said we couldn’t eat, so we made a starbust trifle. (We melted the starbust candy with butter, orange juice and cointreau to make a sauce…more below).
Ingredients
For the lamb chops, we put a rub of garlic, rosemary, and salt and pepper on them.
Cutting garlic for the rub
Then we grilled them for 3 – 4 minutes a side.
Flipping the lamb
After they had a nice grill mark, we transferred them to the oven at 375° Fahrenheit. Although we had eight of these lollipop lamb chops, everyone was hungry for more after dinner!
We also made a spinach/arugula salad with avocado, chickpeas, tomatoes, chopped almonds and parmesan cheese. We dressed it with a balsamic vinaigrette.
Salad
Ramps are baby leeks–they look sort of like scallions but ramps have bigger leaves and are completely edible. You just have to clean them really well. Mom helped clean them (because she said she didn’t want to eat mud) and then we chopped them into thirds and sauteed them with olive oil and salt and pepper. We also made couscous. Then when we plated the lamb chops, we used the ramps as a delicious garnish.
Cleaned ramps
Sauteeing the ramps
Plated entree.
For a special appetizer, I (Alex) wanted to try to cook chicken liver. Oooooh…it looked really weird (kind of like a brain). I sauteed it in olive oil with a little garlic and salt and pepper. Then I toasted some bread, drizzled it with olive oil and put the liver on top of the bread. We all tried it but I think Koko (our dog) liked it best.
Cooking the liver.
Liver bruschetta anyone?
For dessert, I (Alex) improvised with frozen french toast sticks, oranges, almonds, raspberries and starburst candy (we had about 100 starburst candies and mom said we couldn’t eat them, so I decided to try to make them into dessert.) I decided to make a “trifle” with the french toast being the cake. Trifle is a layered dessert usually made up of pieces of cake soaked in rum or sherry, then custard or whipped cream, fruit or jam, more whipped cream and then whatever you like on top…shaved chocolate, nuts… I melted down the starbust candies with butter, orange juice and cointreau to make a liquid to soak the cut-up french toast in. I also added a little rum (carefully. I turned off the heat first!) I put the french toast (and this liquid) at the bottom of the trifle, then I added fresh raspberries. Then I added whipped cream and I topped it with chopped almonds and the zest of an orange. Pretty good use of starbursts if I do say so myself…
Melting the starburst candy in orange juice and Cointreau
I added a little more rum to make the sauce less sticky.
Layering in the raspberries
Starburst Trifle
