Food Glorious Food

For a change, we have nothing planned for this weekend and were feeling rather lazy this morning.  Therefore, we decided to take Olga down to our local cafe to pick up the papers.  This is quite a new treat for us, as the cafe only reopened a few months back and it is so nice to not have to drive all the way to town.

Of course, while we were there we had to sample the fare, and rather nice it was too, sitting out in the sun partaking of coffee, freshly roasted just next door, and delicious cake.  It’s a hard life, but someone has to do it.

Because we were staying close to home today I decided to cook a casserole, so on Thursday night when I did the groceries I bought some lamb shanks.

Now:

1.  I’m a very basic cook.

2.  I don’t buy recipe magazines (I just spend all my money on craft ones).

However, for some unknown reason, I started browsing some recipe magazines in the supermarket and happened to pick up a “Family Circle”, which I haven’t looked at in probably 20 years.  I just happened to open it at a page with a recipe for lamb shanks in red wine.  I read it, and as it sounded a bit different to the usual I bought the magazine, 2 oranges and some olives.

Well, we’ve had a success.  This morning I marinated the shanks in red wine and orange, and this evening I made the scrummiest casserole.  The recipe used stovetop cooking, but I just bunged it in a slow oven for 3 hours.  The flavours were red wine, orange, lots of garlic, olives, tomatoes and rosemary.  They work a treat.

Dinner for two a la kitchen table.

Yummo.  I’ll keep that recipe.

There were lots of other great sounding winter recipes in the magazine as well, so I might just try some more……. we’ll just see how motivated I get.  Don’t hold your breath.