Last night I made dinner for one of Javier's colleagues Luke and Luke's wife and baby daughter. I love love love cooking for people and I made of feast of recipes from a "new cuisine" African cookbook Javier's family gave me last X-Mas. I like this cookbook so much I thought I should copy the Julie & Julia blog model and make a recipe (or two) from this cookbook everyday until I've exhausted the contents. I don't think I'm quite that ambitious, however, and I'm also reluctant to work with some of the ingredients, like lamb, or don't know if I'd find the best quality of some of the products, like shellfish.
The menu was as follows:
lemon and olive chicken
potato and lentil dumplings
red rice
a simple salad of baby lettuces from our garden with a peanut dressing
papaya ketchup
ginger beer
mint green ice tea
banana frittes for dessert
We ate some of the food too fast for me to photograph, but what I did capture is bellow. I also had another successful session of bread making so my bread-baking phobia is over. I baked two loves of Greek olive bread, with cilantro and red onion, with pretty dough braids wrapped around the loaves. Again, it was too good and gone too fast for me to take a photo and the second loaf was given to our neighbor who kindly mows our lawn for us.
Papaya ketchup and Ras Al-Hanout, which is a mix of spices and which I rubbed into the chicken before roasting. It includes ground cardamom, the seeds of which I pulled from the pods and ground myself; I now realize why ground cardamom is $11 in the store: it's painstaking work.
Potato and lentil dumplings, fried and then baked
A peach and blackberry pie I made a few weeks ago with fruit from the farmer's market.
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