Summer Winter Dinner

If a pot is cooking, the friendship will stay warm.
~ Arab Proverb

Good company for dinner is one of the best pleasures in life. I had that this evening :-)

I begin to surprise myself now with the way I think I am actually getting into this Cook-through the Cookbook thing… I fear I may even be mildly – just mildly – addicted to it! Hmm. In any case, tonight’s recipes of choice from “Falling Cloudberries” were:

#11 Tava (Cypriot Baked Lamb & Potatoes with Cumin & Tomatoes) – Page 173
#12 Baked Amaretti & Vin Santo Plums with Mascarpone Cream – Page 326

And I’ll admit it, I cheated and edited the recipes.

Since we got home pretty late, I didn’t want to spend 2.75 hours cooking the lamb & potatoes! So I par-boiled the potatoes and browned the lamb, reducing the cooking time by around 1.75 hours. I was also skeptical of just using cumin, so I added in cinnamon and paprika.

This is what it looked like pre-baking:

And here it is on a plate… not a great photo I’m afraid! (No angles would make it look appetizing). It did taste far better than it looks in the picture. It was also a ‘wintry’ meal perfect for today’s grey weather. However… I did not think it was fantabulous.

Dessert, on the other hand…

You know how sometimes it feels like only chocolate cake or tiramisu or sticky date pudding count as ‘real’ desserts?

I did not need cake at all tonight. Because, these peaches, and the mascarpone cream, were delectable.

Substitutions: I used peaches instead of plums, oat biscuits because the supermarket did not have amaretti biscuits, a mixture of Spiced Gold & Kahlua because we did not have vin santo.