Moroccan Chicken with Green Olives & Preserved Lemon

Several months ago, I decided I wanted to make preserved lemons.  As is often the case, Adam’s immediate response was “Okay – but what are we going to do with them?”  That’s where Gourmet’s recipe for Moroccan Chicken with Preserved Meyer Lemons and Green Olives came in.  We cooked this dish a few weeks ago and really enjoyed it, so when it came time to have our friends Aaron and Diana over for dinner we decided we’d cook it again, along with some other Moroccan-influenced dishes.

I think I’ve convinced Adam that the preserved lemon was worth it. I really did decide somewhat on a whim to make it – after seeing a whole bunch of blogs talk about it with a short time period, I was itching to try it out. Admittedly, I had little idea of what the heck to do with it. When Adam would ask I just told him what little I knew: It’s good for middle eastern dishes! It… it makes the lemon peel edible, and really tasty! Finally, about a month after stuffing my Meyer lemons in a jar with some salt and lemon juice, I went looking for a way to use them. I think this recipe was a really great way to highlight the awesome flavour that comes from the pickled lemon… and after two recipes worth, we’re already about halfway through the jar.

It’s a really nice dish – quite simple and packed full of flavour. As Aaron said – it kind of tastes as if it was cooked with a tagine, even though it just uses nice big skillet.

I changed very little, but the full recipe is behind the cut.

Chocolate Ravioli

This is a recipe that we saw on Giada’s Everyday Italian some time ago, and had it in the back of our minds for awhile as something we wanted to try. When looking for dessert ideas for a dinner with our friends Aaron & Diana, we decided it was time to give it a whirl.

You only really need four things to make this recipe: wonton wrappers, egg, nutella, and a whole bunch of oil.

It’s so incredibly simple I’m barely even going to refer to her recipe when typing it out.

Back to Blogging

Adam and I have been bad bloggers of late. Our last blog post was 3 weeks ago. We’ve just not been in a cooking mood of late. Following our break in early March, we’ve just not be as in love with all things domestic as usual. And in general, everything in our lives seems to just be busy these days. Work has kept us both a bit frazzled, my volunteering duties with Relay For Life is kicking into high gear (we’re 2 months away! Eek!), we just spent a weekend visiting my family in Indiana, and suddenly we’re finding our weeknights busier and busier each week. This week has been a prime example of our lack of wanting to cook:

• Monday: Pizza before our weekly Italian lesson
• Tuesday: I was out at a Relay meeting – Adam got shawarma
• Wednesday: A last minute stop at the grocery store resulted in a huge pot of pasta with meatballs and italian sausage and a kit salad. Not exactly creative, but easy and tasty.
• Thursday: We picked up burgers from a local pub

That’s right – we’ve barely cooked all week. A pretty sad state for our kitchen.

BUT. We have pushed ourselves to cook on weekends, and have a remarkable number of plans with friends over the next little while. So, posts currently in the works:

• Spinach and Beef Ravioli with Mascarpone
• Moroccan Chicken with Green Olives and Preserved Lemon
• Spinach Feta Cigars
• Chocolate Ravioli (oh yeah, that’s right)
• A super rich vanilla ice cream

We hope to get all of those posted by the end of the weekend, and then to push ourselves to actually cook during the week. We have a number of food related events over the next month, so that should inspire us to get back to it a bit more as well. I miss this aspect of our lives, and with the weather warming and BBQ season coming back, I can’t wait to see what tasty goodies we come up with over the next few weeks.