Country Cooking Club

A neighbor and I make up the country cooking club that meets in my kitchen on Thursday evenings.  As long as the weather is crummy enough to keep us out of our gardens and one of us was able to make the trek to a decent grocery store we cook.  

It started out with my fear of cooking lamb, or possibly even eating lamb.  So we first did a white bean rosemary lamb shank stew and it was delicious!  We also did lamb kafta with fatoush and an incredible lamb shoulder roast.  

I should have been better at keeping a record along the way but honestly there is not much time for pictures and writing notes when there are many mouths to feed.  Here's a few of the recent dishes I did catch:

Ecuadorian Chicken Stew.  What intimidated me the most about this recipe was the achiote paste but that is what made it fabulous.  This was a perfect comfort meal on a freezing Feb. evening.

More recently we  made hassle back potatoes.  We let Clara and Maryanna practice their knife skills on these.  They were fun to make and fun to eat!

We also made lamb liver and onions.  Before cooking this my neighbor taught me the very important lesson on how to properly clean and season a cast iron skillet, and also how to have the patience for transparent onions.   Charlie gobbled the liver up and begged for more.

We also discovered these super simple kale and goat cheese frittata muffins.  The red pepper in them made all the difference although I found when feeding them to my children it required a bit of crumbled bacon and less goat cheese.  These are perfect to pass around during the 20 min drive to church.

This next dish, lemon-pepper soy-ginger lamb heart stir fry, was unexpectedly my favorite.  When I opened the package of lamb liver I did not know the heart was hiding beneath it.  At first I was going to throw it to the dogs but decided to experiment instead.  It was so tender!  We cooked this on an evening when the boys were away so us girls got to enjoy it all to ourselves and Maryanna now says lamb heart is one of her favorite foods.  She also said, "maybe it was so good because we loved the lamb so much and he loved us".  

Recently the temperature has been warming up so we opt to stay outdoors instead of cooking. The girls on the other hand join for their own club.  They are perfecting the recipes from the Mudpie cookbook they got for Christmas.  

And I have to admit it looks tempting, one of these days I'm going to dig in with may hands and join them.