Well…nothing like being a day late and a dollar short, right? Last week got away from me and I didn’t manage to finish up this last post until today. I won’t go into details, but my tardy post is a result of being up nights with a sundowning dog–who knew that dogs could get Alzheimer’s? Maybe I’ll do a post on that someday. For now, we’re just going to love our little, old girl dog through her difficult times and go without some sleep. I mean–who could resist this little face, right?
So the final day of this challenge came and I’ll tell you–I was scraping the bottom of the barrel! But it was such a fun challenge! I ended up basically with a kabocha squash, a pound of lamb (in the freezer from, a previous shopping trip), about a half a pound of shrimp (I had put it into the freezer right away), some greens, three pears and of course, some pantry staples. I decided to make a spiced lamb stuffed kabocha squash and a salad of greens, a pear, blue cheese and candied pecans.
The salad turned out great–I had fresh pecans (I order them from Gilbert Pecans in Santos, Texas) and made these pretty amazing candied pecans:
Then I mixed them with the remaining salad greens, one of the pears and some blue cheese and dressed the whole thing with the basic vinaigrette and viola! This salad was a home run winner! It’s easy enough to put together for a Tuesday evening dinner, but elegant enough for a New Year’s Eve extravaganza.
The lamb filled squash was pretty good, but…it was quite a lot of work to make at the end of a long week when all I really wanted to do was order a pizza.
Maybe this is just because I cooked it too long, but I found the kabocha squash to be a little on the dry side to be a home run in this dish. The lamb mixture was quite tasty, but when paired with the kabocha squash, it was a little dry and actually kind of bland. I still have some of the lamb mixture leftover and I’m going to try it with zucchini or eggplant and I think that might actually be more successful. It also might be better with something like a little sugar pumpkin…I don’t know. I’ll report back when I do more experimenting!
Overall, though–this was a very fun challenge and I loved the idea of using up everything that I bought for the week, as well as having to be pretty creative along the way!
This week, I plan to do a similar challenge, but with a little more curated assemblage of ingredients. Tune in tomorrow to get all the details!
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
