Big Dinner Last Night!
For dinner last night, I made some of my favs.
We started with brown butter butternut squash soup, which came from a recipe I found in the NYTimes four or five years ago. It is awesome, and has in it one of my favorite things: brown butter. Brown butter is just butter melted and heated in a saute pan until it turns light brown and smells yummy and nutty. In France, they call it “beurre noisette” (hazelnut butter). I roasted two squash with salt, cinnamon, and light brown sugar (like with the lasagna), then blend it with the brown butter (I used two sticks!), vegetable stock, and then season with a little cayenne and lemon juice.
Our main course was braised lamb shanks cooked like my Moroccan chicken dish featured earlier, though since I used lamb shanks, I had to braise for four hours. I took the lamb off the bone after it was ready (most of it had fallen off already because I did a good job and it was super tender!), then reduced the sauce with the apricots and dates, and served it over couscous. Big hit. There was also a salad with goat cheese and apples.
For dessert, I made a cardamom banana bread pudding. Cardamom is one of my favorite spices and it is extra good with bananas. And bread pudding is ridiculously easy and delicious, so that was a good choice after hours and hours of browning and braising and blending. Basically I just rip up a challah (oh, and when you make bread pudding, you get to steal pieces of challah, too), put it in a cake pan with some bananas, heat butter, milk sugar, pinch salt, and my spice of choice and pour it over the bread along with three eggs that have been beaten. I had 2 pieces last night and one for breakfast and one for lunch tonight. Yay.
