Moroccan Dinner

Sake with Gold Flakes Sho Chiku Bai Kinpaku was gift from Kazue our Japanese neighbor. It is a traditional Sake served at Japanese New Years. The gold flakes are totally healthy and give a shimmer to the sake. The bottle was so enormous we decided to save it for a party with many guests. This was the time! Like all good sakes it is served cold.

Robert Foley Claret 2000 this was a BIG bottle of wine from Chris at the Cheese Store of Silverlake. It was given to me as a present on my 60th birthday. I was looking for an appropriate gathering to open it. It went perfectly with the dinner.

Chatau Longueville Pauillac-Medoc – 1982 Bordeaux was brought by Les and Linda. 1982 is the gold standard for Bordeaux, we were lucky to get this bottle, after a little trouble with the cork we served it to a happy table!

Cathy and I had wanted to repay our neighbors for some past dinners and finally we got a date and a menu that worked for all.

Neighbors: Bea, David and Shelley, Mike and Terry, Les and Linda

There is a Lebanese Restaurant that we occasionally go to named: Marouch. It has absolutely the best Baba Ganoush we know of. The flavor is amazingly Smokey. We couldn’t resist it as an appetizer that would go with the Moroccan dinner we were planning. In addition I went to Joan’s on 3rd Street for their peta toasts that are crunchy and buttery.

We used the Casa Moro Cookbook. We had eaten at their restaurant in London and its combination of Spanish and Moroccan food was typical of the food we like to eat.

We made an additional appetizer: Carrot Puré with feta from the Moro Cookbook. It is fairly easy and has a taste that is just great.

For a first course we made: Lentils with Beets and Preserved Lemons from Deborah Madison’s cookbook Vegitarian Cooking for Everyone. It is a favorite of ours. Preserved lemons are easy to make, and months before we had bought the lemons and preserved them. All it takes to preserve them is: Lemons, lemon juice, salt and olive oil. Store them away, shaking them for the first week, then refrigerating them. No reason to ever buy them.

We made the Lamb Tagina from the Morro cookbook. We purchased the lamb shanks at Gus Meats and they were enormous! Last time we were in San Francisco we purchased two clay cooking pots and we wanted to use them for this meal. The have to be soaked overnight before their first use. We soaked them and then prepared the tagina. The meat and sauce are sealed in the pots and then they cooked for 6 hours at a low temperature. We wondered if the pots would make it, but they did and the meat fell off the bone. It was flavorful and tender.

We served it with couscous.

We once went to the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite for a dinner prepared by Stephen Pyles. One of his great recipes is his Apple Cake. We decided to make it, and cooked it on Thursday before the dinner on the Saturday. The cake only gets better with age! We served it with Sheer Bliss Ice Cream and Carmel Sauce from Recchiuti Confections in San Francisco – YUM!

Later we served some Drambuie Liquor.

It was a great night with talk of Opera, Politics, Senior Activities and maybe the start of Bea’s re-election campaign to the neighborhood council.