We invited J's parents for an Easter dinner at home. Yes, lamb
!
First I served hors d'oeuvre - mini pita cups with sea scallops & minted pea puree; and pureed beets with yogurt & Za'atar.
For the former, I adapted a recipe from Martha Stewart's Hors D'oeuvrers Handbook with some changes: replacing chicken stock with white wine and adding lemon juice to enhance clean sweet pea taste. Everyone seemed to like the combination of minty pea and scallop. For the latter, I adapted a recipe from Yatam Ottolenghi/Sami Taminmi's cooking book,
Jersalem, adjusting the amount of garlic and red chile; and replacing toasted herzelnut with pistachio to garnish. Matching beets and fresh goat cheese is always a winner. Za'atar and red chile made the sweet beet puree savory twist. Mini pita cups worked very well for both scallops and beets. Light texture, neutral flavor, and thin but sold structure to be a cup.
Main was lamb
shawarma. I followed the recipe from Jersalem. The book said this was hardly a proper
shawarma recipe but the marinated lamb legs ends up tasting close enough to the real things without using a vertical rotating spit at home. That's something I suppose ordinary household like us doesn't have.
Total 18 ingredients were in the marinade, 11 out of which were known as Lebanese spice mix. I toasted spices, grained, and mixed them with fresh ingredients like ginger, garlic, lemon juice, cilantro, and peanut oil. At the grocery store, we couldn't find bone-in leg of lamb but semi-bone-in leg of lamb. I wasn't sure what "semi" meant, but surely it was leg of lamb anyway. I massaged the lamb with the marinade well and chilled overnight. The recipe expected a total roasting time of 4 1/2 hours, but my lamb took less than 3 hours to reach 150-155 F, "medium." Maybe it was because of "semi." Since it wasn't a real
shawarma, not shaving but slicing the lamb was our way to go. The meat was moist and the flavor was fantastic. Overnight marinade helped the spices seep into the lamb.
As a side dish, I roasted potatoes in the roasting pan with the lamb, which absorbed the cooking liquids from the lamb.
Another side dish was Swiss shard with tahini, yogurt and butterd pine nuts. The recipe was also from
Jerusalem. Everyone made a good comment on this dish.
I also made fresh cherry tomato, radish, cumumber salad with just only chopped parsley and squeezed lemon juice, which can be seen in the photo of my plate at the top. No black pepper or salt or oil. Simple refreshment.
I was happy with the results of each dish. But this was not the end. There is no Easter without sweets at least for me. To be continued...
