When this lamb’s Moroccan…

Certainly one of the best aspects of wedding preparation is planning the honeymoon. For months we have been back and forth on where to go. We wanted an adventure – something that wouldn’t be appealing once we have kids. We wanted to go somewhere neither of us had been before, and we wanted a place that offered more than just a beach.

Much like a multiple choice exam question, we decided to go with the first place we thought of before toying with various other iterations. We’ve settled on Morocco. We’re flying to Marrakesh two days after the wedding. From there we will tour around to a few cities, including a great windsurfing spot on the coast, Essouira, and then head to Paris for a three nights before returning home.

Around the corner from our apartment is a little Moroccan restaurant called Bab Marrakesh. Mohammed, the owner, sat down with us and enthusiastically helped us map out where to go and how to go about it. He opened our eyes to the must-sees and gave us a sense of what was feasible with our 10 days while we sampled his koufta (little ground beef burgers with cilantro), lamb brochettes, merguez sausage, and falafel. Everything was delicious.

A quintessential image that stands out for me when I imagine Morocco – probably because it’s featured in every travel book on the country – is colourful spices piled high in fabulous towers in a market setting. I can’t wait to taste the food there, so I’m getting a head start and trying some recipes here at home.

Inspired by the skirt steak success, and still yearning for a slow cook experience, I decided to get some lamb and try a recipe I found on epicurious. Moroccan slow-cooked lamb calls for 2.5 pounds of lamb shoulder, boned and trimmed, that get coated in a spice mixture, seared, then cooked for 60 minutes in chicken broth with chopped tomato, chickpeas, and dried apricots (among other things).

We opted to get the lamb shoulder bone-in so we could butcher it ourselves. Shoulder has a lot of connective tissue, which is why it is best cooked slowly to help some of that break down. We cut out as much as we could and chose to cook the chops along with their bones to take advantage of the extra flavour.

On the side we made couscous, and tossed it with chopped mint, grated lemon zest and toasted almond slivers, as the recipe suggested. The toasted almond slivers added a yummy crunch and from this day forward I will consider adding toasted almond slivers to everything I make.

All in, the prep and cooking took about 2 hours.  By the end the dried apricots had completely broken down into delicious mush. The meat was tender and not too chewy (a concern of ours whenever cooking with or ordering lamb) and the whole dish was a tasty feast.

I’m sooo ready for this honeymoon.

White dress, skirt steak

Before things get really confusing for those of you who read this blog but don’t actually know me (thanks!), I’m going to explain a few things. First off, I’ve been asked why I don’t refer to my husband as anything but that, and it’s merely because the guy wants to maintain a degree of anonymity, ok? He doesn’t even have a facebook account.

Also, even though we are legally married and therefore husband and wife, we have a wedding coming up. Another one. This time in a church. The city hall service was so we could comfortably move to these United States and so I wouldn’t have to endure the term “fiancé” for long. The church one is so we can celebrate with hundreds of people and I can wear a long sparkly white dress for a day and feel really good about it.

So now the registry items are flowing in. Which means my already well-stocked kitchen is becoming even more so. We can all agree – Martha, too – that this is a good thing.

We received a waffle iron not long ago and for three days I basically had cake for breakfast. And for snack. Also a good thing, but not when you have an aforementioned sparkly white dress to fit into.

We tried two different batter recipes and both were magnificent. I’m determined to crack the code on the unbeatable Pain Quotidien Belgian waffle, so until I do, I’m not even going to get into it.

What I want to talk about today is skirt steak. Given that we had vegetarian noodle soup for several days in a row – or two weeks, as it would appear from my lack of updates – I found myself craving meat. I picked up chicken breast for a non-fried Donburi and then as I moved away, found myself reaching for skirt steak. Now, having never gone near one of these cuts, I wasn’t sure where to begin. But something about the stripy fatty grain said “slow cook”. As I was to shortly discover, to my fiancé they said “24 hour marinade and then sear”.

Skirt steak refers to either a flank or plate cut. I’m going to go off on a limb and say this was flank. They can be tough, so should either be cooked really quickly or really slowly. I was feeling the slow cook, but as I have found, a marriage is all about compromise, and in this case 24 hour marinade and sear would be the victor. I’ll simply have to hold out for the slow cooker.

My husband pierced the meat all over before adding it into a thick Ziploc bag along with 5 cloves of sliced garlic, 1 sliced scallion (green and white parts), about a fifth of a white onion, chopped, 2 Tablespoons of both soy sauce and sesame oil, a dash of rice wine vinegar and a squirt of sriraccha. Then we mixed it all up and packed it into the refrigerator where all that goodness would be soaked up overnight.

That night we made Donburi, which I have told you about before so I won’t write it up again. But instead of frying up a chicken cutlet, we cut a chicken breast into chunks and simply cooked them in liquid before adding the onions and mushrooms. You’re supposed to spoon off any froth as they cook for a couple of minutes, but I didn’t really find that they produced any. These bowls may not look pretty but they are flipping awesome and could not be quicker or simpler to make. I’m not kidding, if you haven’t tried making donburi, do so as soon as possible. It’s pure Japanese comfort food and is sure to become one of our winter staples.

The next morning, I gave the skirts a flip and then counted down the hours until we would slap them on the grill.

We don’t have a grill. So we fired up the cast iron skillet on high heat.

Using paper towel we wiped away any leftover bits of marinade as not to have them burn. Then we seared the meat on both sides (it only took a couple of minutes to get a nice char going) and sliced it across the grain when it was cooked to our liking.

We served the sliced beef over white rice. It may not be apparent in the pictures, but I didn’t want it to END.

A quick note about the lack of updates:

I wanted to write about this – you know, trying new meats and marinating – but then THIS happened. The parallels are there, we both know it. So I waited until it wasn’t top of mind. Also, I got lazy.

Quick and easy: Asian noodle soup

Long before we entered the hottest July on record since 1999, we made several quarts of chicken stock and stuck them in the freezer.

Flash forward to two weeks ago, when, following a bachelorette party in Vegas with my nine best girlfriends and the bachelorette’s wedding in Vancouver the following weekend, I found myself with a full-blown summer cold.  A runny nose in 90-degree heat seems so out of place, but there I was.

There’s a noodle place called Totto Ramen on 52^nd between 8^th and 9^th that is rammed whenever I walk by. Apparently their authentic soups are so good that people will line up even in sweltering heat.

Inspired by New York’s dedication to delicious Japanese noodle soup, but not to extent that we were willing to stand in line for an hour, we looked to the freezer for the nearly forgotten stock and got to work on a delicious soup of our own.

We set the frozen quart of stock in a pot on high heat and waited until it was boiling to add one large carrot (peeled and thinly sliced), two lengths of celery (thinly sliced diagonally across), a small head of broccoli (florets on their own and the stalk peeled and thinly sliced), three cloves of garlic (again, thinly sliced) and half a white onion (chopped).

Prior to adding the vegetables, we also added a handful of crispy dried seaweed that once re-hydrated had expanded 50 times its size. We took most of it out, but the remaining saltiness really punched up the flavor.

As the vegetables cooked, we set about flavoring the broth with our favorite Asian sauces. A splash of each of the following went in: soy sauce, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar and Sriracha chili sauce. We grated in some fresh ginger and when the vegetables were cooked to our liking we added in the dried noodles. They needed about three minutes to soften up.

The soup ate like a big moist stir-fry. As I was typing this yesterday and thinking back to how good it was I got so hungry for soup that we made another one, this time flavoring the broth with lemon grass in place of ginger.  We skipped broccoli, as well, and added peas. I was a little careless with the hot sauce; the subsequent spiciness had me blowing my nose as if I was still sick (I’m not).  We also added the dried seaweed again and found that six tiny pieces did the trick.