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 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!
Happy Easter! Here are some of the eggs we dyed, then had an Easter Egg Hunt with and then ate in egg salad.
Tonight we experimented with our new Sous Vide machine – sous vide is a method of cooking in which food is sealed in airtight plastic bags then placed in a water bath and heated by the Sous Vide machine. Our good friends, the Mitlyngs, gave us the machine this weekend and we couldn’t wait to try it.
This machine will heat the water to a set temperature with only a .1 of a degrees margin of error. We researched how long to cook chicken so it would be medium well done and juicy and tried cooking 6 chicken breasts for 2 hours at 140° Fahrenheit and…they were the most moist chicken breasts we have ever eaten! We seasoned half of them with salt and pepper before we cooked them; the other half we left plain but grilled them (not to cook them but to give them a cool grilled look) and served with barbecue sauce. Both versions were amazing. Thanks Mitlyngs! Come back soon!
The Sous Vide Machine
Sealing the zip lock bags –we tried to get all the air out
And the chicken is in!
Chicken slowly cooking
Grilling half of the cooked chicken
Grilled chicken…plated.
Incredibly juicy chicken! Best ever!
This past Saturday we hosted a dinner party with old friends who had temporarily moved out-of-town (but who were visiting for the weekend), along with another family as well. All in all there were 6 adults and 6 kids so everyone brought something. We made a huge batch of pasta bolognese based on Mario Batali’s recipe from his Babbo cookbook and an extra large arugula, parmigiano and tomato salad. We also bought proscuitto, mozarella and fresh pasta from our favorite Italian deli in Little Italy. One family brought roasted vegetables and an apple cake; and the other family brought two pies. It was a feast. (And just in case people were still hungry, mom ordered two pizzas.)
The bolognese sauce is delicious but required a lot of chopping: 6 stalks of celery, 4 carrots, 2 onions and 7 cloves of garlic. We started making it on Friday so we would have enough time…
Alex peeling carrots
Alex chopping celery
Finally everything is chopped!
Sauteeing vegetables in olive oil until translucent
Once the vegetables were soft and translucent we added ground veal. (The recipe calls for 1/2 veal and 1/2 pork but we decided to try all veal this time). We let that brown and then added tomato paste, milk and wine. Then it just simmered for a long time. We put in in the fridge over night and then reheated it on very low heat. Served with fresh pasta and parmigiano-reggiano!
For the salad: we kept to the tried and true:
Arugula, parmigiano, grape tomatoes and lemon-olive oil dressing
Shaving parmigiano for the salad
For this dinner, we were tired from another busy soccer weekend so mom said she was just going to go to the grocery store and buy random food and that we (the kids) would have to figure it out. She came back with chicken, bacon, corn bread, arugula, kumato tomatoes & fresh green peas, and told us we had to make an appetizer and an entree using those ingredients and whatever else we could find in the kitchen. She also said that we had to make it fast because we were all hungry. (Now we know what its like when WE come home and demand to be fed pronto.) Kumato tomatoes are red-brown and taste delicious.
We came up with a plan: arugula salad with kumatos, bacon and goat cheese (that we had in the fridge) topped with corn bread croutons. To save time we cooked the bacon in the microwave. We made the croutons by cubing the corn bread, tossing with olive oil and broiling for a few minutes. For the salad dressing, we just made a simple lemon-olive oil dressing. We thought about adding the peas but they were so good raw, we just ate them as a snack.
Then for our main course, we cooked the chicken in olive oil, chicken broth and lemon juice, made a simple tomato sauce (red onions, grape tomatoes, olive oil and a little chicken broth) and cooked egg noodles. We also added a little cooked bacon and fresh basil as a garnish to the sauce. Dinner was ready in less than an hour and was delicious.
The mystery ingredients: corn bread, chicken, bacon, kumato tomatoes, fresh peas, egg noodles & arugula.
What to do with corn bread? Make corn bread croutons!
Salad: pre-croutons
Salad with croutons
Team work. Testing pasta (Max) and finishing the sauce (Alex)
Quick tomato sauce.
The full dinner.
This weekend was so busy with soccer (we both had soccer tournaments–including one that lasted from 3 to 9 PM on Sunday in New Jersey !!!!!!) that we decided to keep it simple AND cook on Saturday instead of Sunday. We made lamb burgers, baked potatoes, arugula salad with pine nuts, prosciutto, goat cheese and tomatoes and strawberries and cream. We also made tapenade because mom wanted to put it on her lamb burgers. The rest of us put goat cheese or fresh mozzarella on our burgers.
The ingredients: lamb, goat cheese, pine nuts, olives, arugula, proscuitto, tomatoes
Shaping the burgers (wash hands before and after)
Making tapenade was really easy, we just put pitted kalamata olives, minced garlic and olive oil in our mini-cuisinart. We whirred it together and then served it with toasted bread (or you could put it on your lamb burger)
Making tapenade in our mini-Cuisinart
Tapenade (black kalamata olive) dip
Max flipping the lamb burgers, Alex toasting pine nuts
Arugula, goat cheese, pine nuts, proscuitto & tomato salad
Strawberries & Cream
Tonight we wanted to try to recreate some of our favorite Chinese take-out dishes. We are very lucky because we live in New York City, so we have a lot of great take-out and delivery options. But its nice to try to recreate some of our favorites so we made Cantonese-style barbecue ribs; stir fry broccoli and water chestnuts; white rice; and egg-drop soup. For dessert we had the fortune cookies we made yesterday. Everything tasted really good, although not exactly the same as our Chinese take-out.
The full meal!
The ingredients…
Cantonese-style Barbecued Short Ribs
The ribs were much easier than we thought. First we marinated them in a mix of soy sauce, ginger, garlic and hoisin sauce (2 hours to overnight). Then we put them on a rack over a cup of water and cooked them for an hour (turning and basting at the 30 minute mark). Finally, we brushed them with honey and let them cook for another 10 minutes.
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The stir fry was also pretty easy, although next time we might steam the broccoli a little before we stir fry it because it takes a long time to cook otherwise. Both of us had to work on it…
We also made egg drop soup. We boiled chicken broth and then whisked 2 beaten eggs into it. It was so cool to see the eggs cook and separate. We topped it with chopped scallions.
Finally we had fortune cookies for dessert!
In preparation for our Chinese-themed dinner tomorrow (February 28), we decided to make fortune cookies. First we wrote the fortunes. That was pretty fun. My (Alex) favorite fortunes were: “Let sleeping dads sleep” and “Time to buy Alex a present.” My (Max) favorite fortune was: “Your fortune is in another fortune cookie.”
We typed them up and cut them into small strips of paper.
Our fortunes.
Then we made the cookies. The recipe is easy, but its a lot of work to actually make them. Plus you can only cook 3 at a time.
To make them, you separate the whites of 3 eggs and beat with sugar. Then you add cooled, melted butter, vanilla, almond extract if you have it, water and a cup of flour.
Ingredients for fortune cookies
Beating egg whites and sugar.
Then you pour it into a circular shape three inches in diameter on a baking sheet. We made stencils out of an old plastic lids to helps us get a good circle. Making them out of something flat, like an old cutting board, is a better idea because the lip of the lid interferes with smoothing the batter into a circle
You cook them for 5 – 7 minutes and when they start to turn brown around the edges, you take them out of the oven.
Then you have to immediately lay the paper fortune in, fold one half over and bend over the edge of a cup to get the correct shape. You let the cookies cool folded up inside muffin tins so they keep their shape. they get really crisp.
The result was pretty good, and they tasted a lot better than the ones we get from Chinese takeout. (Dad loved the batter in particular–we had to send him out of the kitchen!)
Alex with the final product
Happy Anniversary Kids Cook Dinner! One year ago this blog was born, on Dinner No.1 (February 22, 2015). Since then we have made 44 diners (sorry–not quite one per week, but we did go to camp for 6 weeks and had a couple vacations in there too).
For this meal mom gave us a mystery box with unknown ingredients, including chicken cutlets, baby broccoli, onions, tomatoes, avocados, basil, strawberries, lemon, garlic, goat cheese and anything else we could find in the kitchen. Alex and I had to collaborate on everything except the chicken cutlets, and we HAD to use chicken, broccoli and…strawberries (HUH, Seriously mom?). Mom also said we had to make at least two vegetable dishes and that we had to make the dinner in less than one hour. So we decided that we would each cook the chicken the way we wanted to, and then we would team up to cook the baby broccoli aand all the other stuff. We also decided to make couscous and a salad and then to use the strawberries both in a drink and in a dessert…READ ON!
Our ingredients! Mom said we had to use the baby broccoli, chicken & strawberries and that we had to have at least 2 vegetable dishes.
Celebrating a year of kids cooking!
For my chicken cutlet I (Max) decided to saute it with minced garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, basil and cherry/grape tomatoes. I let it cook for about 5 minutes per side and added the tomatoes and basil at the end.
Max chopping garlic for chicken
Max cooking chicken
For my chicken cutlet I (Alex) decided to marinate it briefly in olive oil and garlic, and then grill it. I finished it with lemon and fresh basil.
Alex chopping garlic for chicken
Chicken Two Ways: Grilled with lemon, olive oil & garlic (Alex) or sauteed with olive oil, garlic, basil & tomatoes (Max)
We sauteed the baby broccoli with garlic and olive oil and made a very beautiful Arugula-Pear-Goat Cheese- Walnut Salad for our two veggies. The salad was a reflection of our hopefulness for spring and the blossoming of many more flowers.
Sauteing the broccolini
Pear, walnut, goat cheese salad
For the other required ingredient (strawberries), we used them two ways. First we made virgin (no rum) strawberry daiquiris–a skill we have perfected since being in Jamaica. We made simple syrup (one-to-one ration of sugar to water in the afternoon, let it cool, and then combined it with fresh and frozen strawberries….yum!!)
Making strawberry daiquiris with fresh and frozen strawberries.
Strawberry Daiquiris — no rum
We also used the strawberries in our dessert. Because we had made fudge brownies yesterday, we decided to make our version of an ice cream sandwich but using brownies instead of cookies: a brownie-vanilla ice cream sandwich, with sliced strawberries layered on top of the ice cream (between the two brownies) and more strawberries on top. Seriously this is much better than a cookie ice cream sandwich because the brownies are so fudgey!!
Brownie Ice Cream Sandwich
Top View of brownie ice cream sandwich.
Even Koko (our labradoodle) deserves a valentine so I (Alex) decided to make homemade dog treats for Koko. The recipe is really simple: peanut butter, eggs, olive oil, and corn flour or corn meal, chicken broth and whole wheat flour. Koko loves them even though they are made from “people” ingredients
The final product
The ingredients!
Mixing up peanut butter and eggs.
Dog treats ready to bake: mom gave me special dog bone shaped cookie cutters and a “paw” stamp.
We packaged some for our four- legged friends.
