Family Dinner in Boston

Last week, my sister had an art opening at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, and my mom and dad used that as an excuse to finally get out to the east coast after all of these years. With Laura, Mitch, Midori, Ariel, and my mom and dad in town along with Melissa, Dino and Aiden, it was, at times, a full house. We went out to restaurants a couple of times, but the last two nights that the Chicago branch of the family was in town, Dino and I split up cooking duties.

I decided to finally make something out of the Oleana cookbook that I have purchased several months ago. I went with the "Spoon Lamb," a braised lamb shoulder chop with a sauce of reduced braising liquid and pomegranate molasses, and smokey eggplant, a puree of eggplant seasoned with urfa chiles, smoked salt, and lemon, combined with greek yogurt and toasted pine nuts.
We had a shredded carrot salad with apricots and another salad with arugula, shaved fennel, blood oranges, and olives as side dishes.

Lamb kofta, sweet and hot eggplant, and Israeli couscous with pine nuts and lemon zest

I made this dish last night. For the kofta, I mixed together ground lamb, finely diced red onion, garlic, parsley, ras-al-hanout, and sumac and cooked it over the grill. To make the eggplant, start by generously salting and letting the slices stand for about 30 minutes. The salt draws out a lot of liquid and removes the bitterness from the eggplant. Wipe of the salt and press out the liquid with paper towels, then broil the eggplant until golden brown on each side. Meanwhile mix together the juice from 1/2 lemon (for 1 eggplant), 2 T honey, 1 tsp cumin, a pinch of cayanne pepper, 1 tsp grated or minced ginger, and 1/3 cup water. Cook the eggplant with this mixture for about 10 minutes (this recipe comes from Claudia Rodin's Middle Eastern cookbook). To make the couscous, start by cooking minced shallots or red onion with olive oil over medium heat until soft. Add the couscous and chicken stock to cover and cook over medium heat until the couscous is done...just taste periodically until it gets to the texture you like. When it is done, stir in the zest from half of a lemon, a bunch of chopped parsley, and toasted pine nuts.

Family reunion dinner 2

Pretty much everyone had a hand in preparing the next family reunion dinner. The menu included grilled vegetables (zucchini, eggplant, red peppers, and portabella mushrooms), teriyaki chicken, tri-tips with a korean style marinade, sushi and musubi, and potato patties made from roasted potatoes that were left over from the previous night.

Here are my aunties Susan and Pauline and my sister Laura showing off the key ingredient for musubi, Spam. Most people outside of Hawaii think this stuff is pretty gross, but I like it.
Below, Auntie Susan expertly assembles the musubi.
Here's a picture of the potato patties that I whipped up. This was an improvised dish that made use of a bunch of left over ingredients that we had sitting around. I diced up the roasted potatoes from the night before and combined them with left over roasted corn, minced onion, garlic, scallion, mayo, egg, and flour. I would have liked to grill them. The mixture probably would have fallen through the grates, though, so Auntie Nora fried them up.
Here are a few pictures of the final spread.