We've had this ground lamb in the freezer for months, just waiting for us to finally make the lamb burgers I had it earmarked for. I made the ones in this recipe from Emeril and it was super simple. Most of the ingredients I even had on hand - yogurt, cumin, rosemary, that's about it. Stick it in a pita with avocado, tomato, and feta, and it's a gourmet sandwich. One piece of advice though - don't toast the pita if you're going to try to put the burger inside it. I liked it crunchy though so no regrets. Make this, it's awesome!
Last night I made banana bread! LZ's friend had a ton of fruit he had left from his "worship fruit" - it's like an offering to the Buddha. But sooner or later someone has to eat it. And the three bananas were getting overripe. What else could I do with them but make banana bread?! So I settled on this recipe with chocolate chips and walnuts. It came out so good (maybe because it's chock full of chocolate chips) and my favorite dishes are always the ones that can double as dessert & breakfast. So there you have it, Buddha Banana Bread. And what else is funny: I twittered about baking it and eating it. And someone found that and started following me - a person whose username is bananabreadnut. Seriously she has a whole web site about banana bread. I love it!
We bought too many wrappers last time we made ravioli. So we figured we had to make them again, but I wanted to try a new kind. I found these sweet potato ravioli and I love sweet potatoes so we gave it a try. The filling is just mashed sweet potato, brown sugar, and butter. Can't go wrong with that! It was like a dessert. The fried shallots on top were kind of a pain but worth it - really good! There's also a sauce on them that's just melted butter with sage - seemed a little pointless. Overall: dessert-like and yummy!
Cheryl and I made this Lemon Pepper Shrimp Scampi and it was just what we wanted! Good and quick to make before American Idol. Could have been more lemony but we weren't sure how to do that - maybe try lemon zest next time?
I bought pecans for the salad (see below) and the epicurious recipe had links to other pecan dishes and I was tempted by the pecan-filled desserts. I decided on these cookies which were supposed to be sandwich cookies with orange frosting in the middle. The cookies came out really good and looked great too! The frosting I kind of ruined - wrong consistency entirely. I think I wanted it to be more orangey so added too much juice which made it too runny. I kept adding more sugar but it wasn't working so the frosting leaked through the lacy holes in the cookies. Still tasted good though. The cookies are totally good on their own anyways, and maybe next time I'll take another stab at the frosting. Yum!
Since today was a surprise snow day, I wanted to do something special with my extra time so I decided to cook up a feast! We made Cheryl's Sake Glazed Salmon which was really good and simple too! I'll definitely be making that again. And to go with it, I wanted to make a fancy salad. I found this Cabbage Salad on Epicurious and it was so good, just like the reviews said. It has lots of stuff in it - red cabbage, napa cabbage, dried cherries, apple slices, and spiced pecans. I was worried about making them - the worcestershire sauce sounded weird - but they turned out great! It's a different kind of salad but I highly recommend it!
