We will have a lit-tle lamb (can you hear the melody?)

For Easter this year.

These posts do not have the sexiest titles out there. That's a fact. But what can you say about Easter Dinner? Jesus rises from death so we eat a baby sheep! At least in my house we do. The main course for this meal was my idea. My teenager, the one who would likely raise a fuss about eating a lamb, said ‘cool’ so I’m going for it.

One leg o’ lamb coming up. I’m thinking about curried leg of lamb. Stay tuned for the sides. I’ll keep you posted.

A quick web search for curried leg of lamb recipes did not pull up much. I may simply take a curried lamb recipe and use the spice mix as a rub before roasting or grilling.
http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=403496

http://blog.sigsiv.com/2008/08/curried-leg-of-lamb.html

http://www.of2minds.org/spice/archives/001158.html

http://myhusbandcooks.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/no-its-not-voodoo-its-roasted-curried-leg-of-lamb/

image courtesy of this site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aeioux/463253926/

St. Patricks' Day Dinner

Corned beef and cabbage
Champ
Tangy Glazed Carrots
Apple Cake Cockaigne
Whiskey whipped cream
Beer/Sparkling Pomegranate Juice

Epicurious.com played a lead role in the meal. The beef brisket was brined in a recipe from southernfood.com, but otherwise the main meal elements were epicurious creations. A traditional Corned Beef and Cabbage was called for, but the thought of a 100% boiled dinner didn’t seem so special to me. I deviated by making a separate carrot dish. For dessert, I thought a cake would be nice. We have had and enjoyed the Apple Cake Cockaigne recipe from the 1975 edition of the Joy of Cooking several times. I ditched it for the French Apple Cake recipe just below it on the page. It looked good and since I had already bought the cream, I offered a whipped cream dollop for each slice.

Cook's notes:

• be careful not to overcook the cabbage. It was tasty but softer than it needed to be (you can tell in the pix);
• if you want pink corned-beef you have to add salt petre or sodium nitrate, which is a color fixative. It tastes the same regardless;
• you can half the recipe for the sauce that the carrots are tossed in;
• the cake is very good on its own and even better with a flavored whipped cream.

My troop and our the relatives who were over for dinner thoroughly enjoyed the meal.

Corned beef and cabbage:
http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/holidays/stpatricks/corned_beef_and_cabbage_recipe/recipes/food/views/Corned-Beef-with-Cabbage-241775
Champ (for the uninitiated, this is a potato dish):
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Champ-241776
Tangy Glazed Carrots:
From the Gooseberry Farm Family Favorites Cookbook
Apple Cake Cockaigne:
From the Joy of Cooking, 1975 edition
Does Whiskey Whipped Cream actually need a recipe? Even I’m not that needy. Anyway, if you do need a recipe for that, let me know and I’ll figure out the proportions for the ingredients (which are whipping cream, powdered sugar, vanilla and whiskey)

Slainte!
Sparkling pomegranate juice for those who don’t imbibe
Beer for everyone else (No, not green)

Yes, I will feed this to my family

Homemade is best made. When I was ducking through the kitchen all those times as a kid, I missed watching my mother make food from scratch. She made everything from scratch. And she also did not use a microwave.

The ideal of homemade rubbed off on me. I don’t cotton to store bought soup unless I’m sick, in which case Campbell’s Chicken Noodle is my thing. I make soup from scratch, spaghetti sauce, gravy… you name it. I don’t buy pre-seasoned food except in very rare cases.

So this explains the picture. St. Paddy’s Dinner will be corned beef. Pictured is the beef brisket in the homemade brine that has been in my refrigerator since last week.

This is the recipe I followed for the brine.
http://southernfood.about.com/od/cornedbeefandbrisket/r/r70307b.htm

The brisket will be in there for 10 days by the time I cook it. BTW, making the brine was easy sneezy. Much more difficult was finding a supermarket that had a brisket that wasn’t already in the puff pack with seasonings already on it.