Lamb Stew with Dried Plums

May 15, 2012 by Gretchen

Something wonderful happened last night, my friends.

I christened my beautiful, glorious, entirely too expensive birthday gift from Sean with a meal of epic proportions (for more than one reason, natch). Also, I feel it bears noting that I have named my french oven. Her name is Francette.

As promised, the first dish cooked up in my new baby is a delicious, hearty lamb stew with dried plums as inspired by Katniss’ favorite dish from The Hunger Games. I figure that enough time has passed since my 10,000 Hunger Games posts that I can bring it back now, hehe.

I should probably tell you now that I did not follow the recipe from The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook that my friend Lara gave me for my birthday. I used the book, along with this recipe, to give me a general idea of what ingredients to include, but from there I pretty much took off on my own. The reason I didn’t want to follow the recipe in the book was because it had like 28937 ingredients, including a bunch of fresh herbs, both white sugar AND brown sugar, as well as a cup of ginger ale (?). Too complicated! I’m sure the recipe from the book is very tasty, but I like things to keep things simple and, more than that, EASY.

This recipe definitely falls into the simple and easy category. As with any low-and-slow cooked meal, it is a little bit time consuming at first, but after you have all the stuff in the pot, you really get to just set it and forget it. From what I have gleaned, there are two options for making stews: on the stovetop or in the oven. Since it’s already hot and humid as, well, you know, around these parts, and my brother (side note: check out his redesigned photography site!) refuses to turn on the air conditioner, turning my oven was not ideal for me. Plus, I figured with a stovetop recipe, if I want to try making it in a slow cooker next time, the process will translate more easily.

I was able to find lamb specifically designated for stew, that was already cut into chunks in the meat section of my local Giant. If you can’t find something similar, I think that lamb shoulder is the ideal cut, although leg of lamb would be equally as delicious, just more stringy in texture. All the other ingredients are pretty standard (dried plums are the same thing as prunes, and I found them in the nuts and dried fruit section of the grocery store).

Admittedly, by the time the lamb, veggies, and stock were all bubbling away together, things smelled and tasted so good that I was actually some doubts about throwing the dried plums (read: prunes) into the mix.

In the end though, I knew that I had to be true to the one defining characteristic of this stew (it is in the NAME after all!) and toss them in there. I added them with about 25 minutes to go on the stove, and I loveloveLOVED the end result. I’m a huge fan of savory + sweet combos, so this was really perfect for me.

The entire dish reminded me a lot of a chicken curry-type dish that my mama makes. It has a stew-like consistency because the sauce gets so thick, and she always adds raisins to it. It seems a little weird at first to add dried fruit to a dish like that (or like this!) but it just really works! I would definitely call this one a supreme success, and a dish that I will certainly be making a lot in the future — though granted, it’s not exactly a summertime dish, so I may have to waylay it’s follow-up performance to the Fall.

It’s not easy to make a photography of stew look good, but rest assured, it tastes AMAZING!

I served this gloriousness over a bed of jasmine rice, although I think that wild or brown rice would have seemed a little more rustic. I think it also would be delicious just on its own (maybe with a crusty piece of bread to sop up all the saucey goodness?) since, as mentioned, it is very hearty and has everything in it: protein (lamb), veggies (carrots, celery, onion), and a carb (potatoes).

Lamb Stew with Dried Plums
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This hearty, delicious recipe is inspired by Katniss’ favorite dish from The Capitol in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. Simply seasoned with fresh, earthy ingredients, the dried plums add just the right touch of sweetness to this delicious and filling dish. Serve over rice or on its own!

Ingredients:

1 lb. pre-cut lamb for stewing (shoulder or leg cut into pieces is fine too)
3 cloves garlic, chopped
3 small yellow onions, chopped
6 stalks celery, chopped
6 – 7 medium carrots, chopped
5 baby white potatoes, chopped
1 cup dried plums/prunes, chopped
16 oz. low sodium beef broth
1 cup red wine of choice (use a wine you enjoy drinking!)
2 – 3 tbsp olive oil
2 bay leaves
Salt, pepper, and garlic powder

Instructions:

1. Using a paper towel, pat lamb pieces until dry and season with salt and pepper. In a dutch oven or large stock pot, heat olive oil to medium-high heat and brown the lamb on both sides. Remove from pot and set aside on a plate when finished.

2. Reduce the heat to medium, and add roughly chopped garlic and onion to the pot. Sautee until they begin to get soft and translucent, about 2 to 3 minutes. Deglaze pan with red wine, making sure to scrape all the bits of stuck-on deliciousness from the bottom and sides of the pot. Add carrots, celery, potatoes, and cover the vegetables with beef stock. Season with additional salt, pepper, garlic powder, and add bay leaves. Bring to a simmer before adding the lamb and juices back in. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

3. After an hour has passed, add dried plums. Taste and season to your preference. Cover and simmer for an additional 30 minutes, then serve!

Nutritional info per 1/6th serving: 353 calories, 9 g fat, 43 g carbs (6 g fiber), 21 g protein.

Mm-mmm. It was Sean-approved too, if that matters to those of you who are considering whether their boyfriends, husbands, brothers, or dads would be willing to try it. I can’t wait to bust into some leftovers for lunch!

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DC Chobani Dinner

May 14, 2012 by Gretchen

Happy Monday! The start of this week means that Relay Week has officially begun. Come Thursday, I’ll be flying up to Boston to meet up with my rad group of fellow bloggers that make up Team Off Balance for the Reach the Beach Relay! CRAZY!

This weekend ended up being particularly awesome. I didn’t, alas, get in my two-a-day run as I had originally intended (I did still RUN, however, just not twice in one day), but it was pretty great nonetheless. The real star of the weekend was the amazing blogger dinner that I got to attend thanks to my new best friends at Chobani!

It just so happened that Claire was invited to attend this dinner as well, so the two of us set off from good ol’ Falls Church together.

The dinner was in a private dining room at The Federalist, which is a really swanky little restaurant in DC. The menu was specially prepared by the restaurant’s chef to feature Chobani greek yogurt! As a self-proclaimed foodie, it was really fun for me to see what creative ways the chef came up with using yogurt for.

We pulled up to the restaurant and were immediately greeted by Jackie and Emily from Chobani, as well as a few other DC-area bloggers. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a group shot on my camera, but if I can get a hold of one from someone else, you might recognize a few familiar faces. Huzzah for real life and internet-life colliding!

While we were waiting for the entire group to gather, I started off the night with a glass of my beloved prosecco. What can I say? I love my bubbles.

After we were seated, we all immediately began gushing over how nice it is to go to dinner with other bloggers, because you’re not the only one playing the role of food paparazzo, hahaha. It’s automatically understood that nobody touches the food until everyone has gotten their photos, haha!

The menu, as I mentioned, was comprised of dishes that incorporated the use of Chobani greek yogurt. We all got the same starter and dessert, and had a choice between lamb, halibut, and pasta for our entree.

To start us off, they plopped down two bread baskets — one full of normal rolls, and one with cornbread. I think it’s pretty obvious which one I went for, hehe. It was moist and delicious!

Shortly thereafter, we were given our starter: a white gazpacho (which I’ve never had before!) with shrimp, grapes, and minted yogurt. It was DELICIOUS. Super creamy (though the waiter said there was no cream in the actual soup — just cucumbers and almonds!) and very flavorful. I could easily have slurped down the whole thing, but I restrained myself because it was a big bowl and I knew we had two more courses to go. The soup was probably my favorite dish of the evening though, and I’m not very well-versed in cold soups so that should say something!

For my entree I chose the yogurt-poached halibut, which came with small roasted potatoes, artichoke hearts, and lima beans. I thought that all the side accouterments were yummy (which was bound to happen with all the butter that was used, hehe) but unfortunately the fish itself was a little lacking. I think it was mostly a textural thing for me. With a thick cut of fish like that, I was hoping for more of a sear or grill on one side at least, but it really just had the texture of being steamed (I realize the menu said “poached”, but I guess I skipped over that when reading, haha). It was pretty flavorful, so that’s definitely something, but I just didn’t find it to really stand out.

Now, lucky for me, Claire ordered the lamb and was nice enough to share a little of it with me. After my very first bite, I knew that this is what I should have ordered instead. They served it two-ways, sliced and then also a little loaf of shredded lamb mixed up with spices (including fresh dill!) and both were DIVINE. The yogurt sauce that came with it was also delicious, and it was nice to see lamb + yogurt done up in a non-Mediterranean way, since I think that’s what we all would have expected.

As side dishes for the entire table to share during our main course, we were given mushrooms and roasted cauliflower. Both Claire and I agreed that the mushrooms were definitely lackluster (not enough salt, perhaps?) but the cauliflower was outstanding. Some of it got really crispy during the roasting process, and it had tons of garlic on it. I may have to try to recreate some sort of garlic roasted cauliflower fish on my own now — I’ve never had any that good before!

Finally, our last course was served. It was an incredibly, decadent-but-light-tasting panna cotta made with greek yogurt. Let’s just all say it together: NOM. It was served with a fresh strawberry sauce and a shortbread cookie (which I mostly left), and was absolutely heavenly. The texture was really impressive, I wish that the chef had come out to explain if they used cream as well, or if it was really just yogurt (plus the eggs and sugar, and all that other traditional custard stuff). Either way, it was pretty amazing. I completely demolished it, hehe.

So, as you can see, it was a pretty fantastic meal and dining experience. I really loved getting to hear Emily (from Chobani) talk about the company’s origins and founder. She is clearly really passionate about her job and the company, which always makes you fall just a little bit more in love with it. We even got little goodie bags at the end that included a water bottle, tote bag, and little recipe box! I’m not sure if I’ll actually have the patience to hand-write all my recipes onto the cards that came with it, but I do love the idea of having hand-written recipes to pass down to my eventual children’s children’s children, or what have you.

The only unfortunate note to the night was that shortly after we left the dinner, my stomach decided to start stabbing itself with a thousand sharp knives. I had eaten more dairy than I had in probably well over a month that night, and my stomach was NOT happy with me for it. I’m still not 100% used to having to tailor my eating for my lactose intolerance since it’s a relatively recent development, and most of the time I just “happen” to avoid dairy because of my preference for non-dairy milk anyway. (Can I just reiterate my joy that cheese somehow seems to be okay with my digestive system? HALLELUJAH!)

My stomach pains fortunately subsided by the time I got home, but it was kind of touch-and-go there for a while. Poor Claire had to deal with my moans and groans for the entire car ride home, haha. Oh well, all’s well that ends well, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. I’ll just try to remember to take a LactAid next time.

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Chasin’ Tails

May 10, 2012 by Gretchen

Happy Vampire Diaries Day Thursday, everyone! Today is a particularly bittersweet one, because it holds the much-anticipated and much-feared season finale of my beloved TVD. This is a show that KNOWS how to do a season finale (I still remember yelling at my TV after the first season finale), so I’m already nervous about what’s going to happen and who they’re going to kill off. Eeep!

In other, non-teenager related news, I got to have a super fun dining experience last night! I met up with the fantastic Kate last night, marking our first foray into real-life interaction. We’ve been blog buddies for a while, and live so close to each other that we finally realized we had no excuse not to get together! The two of us met up at Chasin’ Tails, a Cajun/New Orleans-style seafood restaurant in Falls Church/Arlington (On 29, where the Bear Rock Cafe used to be, if you’re familiar with the area).

We are having crawfish, woman, not HAM. Tsk.

Their motto? “No plates, no forks, no rules.” It’s quite apt, since they just bring your order in a big bag, which you then dump onto your paper-lined table and knock yourselves out. It was very reminiscent of those crab boil places in Ocean City where you sit at a table lined with brown paper, you get a bib and a hammar, and they just dump a bucket of crabs in front of you. It always makes for a fun, if rather messy, dining experience! Chasin’ Tails also gives you a big metal bucket to dump your trash in, as well as a roll of paper towels that was WELL UTILIZED.

Their menu concept is pretty simple: the main feature is the “Bayou N’ A Bag”, where you pick your seafood (crawfish, shrimp, crab legs, lobster, mussels, clams, etc) in 1 lb. amounts (no half-pounds), pick a sauce (cajun, lemon-pepper, garlic butter, or the whole shebang which combines all three), and pick your spiciness level. They also have a bunch of fried side items and appetizers, and serve gumbo and jambalaya as well (you get a spoon for those, haha).

We ordered a pound of crawfish (it was both of our first time trying it!) and mussels, the former done cajun style, and the latter done in the “Whole Shebang” sauce. We got them both medium spicy, and we are SO glad we did. The spice really built up, so I can’t even imagine how hot “Hot” is… let alone “Nawlins Hot”, which was the top level of spicy you could order. ::shudder::

Each bag came with a little cob of corn, a slice of andouille sausage, and a baby potato in them as well. They were both SUPER delicious! We had to get our waitress to show us how to eat the crawfish (is it pronounced craw-fish or cray-fish?), which looked to me like the mutant lovechild of a lobster and a shrimp.

Right??

I was initially wary of trying “mud bugs”, as they are apparently called sometimes, though I’m not really sure why? I guess I just don’t love eating anything that really looks like an animal… which I’m sure is making all of my vegetarian readers shake their heads in shame. Turns out that I really had no reason to be squeamish – they’re easy and you really get used to the spindly legs and whatnot. The process for eating them evidently goes like this: Pull the tail and head apart, suck the juice out of the head, then pull the meat out of the tail!

Kate, proud of her handiwork!

The meat from the tail tasted just like shrimp to me, though perhaps a little less delicate in texture. Really yummy, though I’m not sure I would eat it again for the meat itself. I think it was more about the experience. Otherwise, it’s a lot of work for very little meat!

Neither of us had a very good concept of how much was appropriate to order, and it turned out that the seafood alone didn’t end up being too much. After all, it’s not like you’re really eating and entire pound of seafood MEAT, the pound includes the weight of the shells/casings/whatever. So I think that ordering three lbs of the seafood dishes between two people would be a good amount (so there would be 1 1/2 pounds each, that way).

We ended up ordering a couple of side items halfway through our seafood chow-down because I could tell that it wasn’t going to be enough. Chasin’ Tails doesn’t really have any non-fried side items though, other than the corn and stuff that comes in the seafood bags, so in the future I’ll definitely make sure I order enough of the main dishes to go around.

Kate and I ended up splitting an order of the cajun fries and six chicken wings, both of which were incredibly delicious but obviously super fried and terrible for you, hahaha. Our waitress was really talking up the wings and sold me on trying them. Three wings for each of us isn’t TOO bad, right?

I would definitely come back here. It’s a pretty unique restaurant for this area, and while I’ve never been to New Orleans, or really had THAT much experience with cajun food, it all seemed pretty delicious to me! I think it would be super fun to take a bigger group of people to, so you can all get different kinds of seafoods to share. The food was flavorful (the Whole Shebang sauce was epic!), our waitress was really nice, and they definitely know what they’re doing in terms of spiciness. My recommendation would be to order conservatively on the spice level if you’re at all wary about it.

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

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