Reminiscing about...

After my belated birthday celebration with my uni classmates the week before last, I finally invited Jier, Rachel and Felix over for dinner last Sunday. It took me a week and many revisions of the same cooking mangazines (I don't own cookbooks) to decide on what to cook. After a few hit & misses, I decided on lamb shanks with polenta & mushroom bolognese and roasted vegetables and salad.


I read few a few lamb shank recipes and just combined them all. It took me almost 2 hours at Victoria Market trying to locate everything I needed. I marinated the lamb shanks the night before with onion, garlic, herbs and red wine. The next day, I seared the marinated lamb shanks, then cooked some pancetta with tomatoes, carrots, onion, garlic, rosemary, thyme and red wine and put the whole lot into a casserole-like dish (it was a very tight fit). It was covered it with foil & just left it in the oven to cook. I think it cooked a total of 4 hours...but...hmmm...I still didn't think it was soft enough.

I got the polenta and mushroom bolognese recipe from Gourmet Traveller. It's basically 2 layers of polenta baked with mushroom bolognese (obvious huh). The recipe uses a mix of mushrooms, thyme, onion and garlic, and tomatoes...interesting. It's meant to cater to vegetarians but it makes a very nice side dish.



They brought over stuff to make lemon lime bitters which turned out really good...I can't believe that they charge anything from $3.50 for it!!

And dessert...I have to give ALL credit to Paul for making opera cake the night before and then giving me a good three- quarters of it for me to try and then for me to feed my guests. The cake was really so good...
You can read all about his until 3am efforts here: http://ptuls.livejournal.com/

We had a good time laughing and just talking. It's nice being able to move into the working world together. It's nice too that the dynamics of our friendships have not changed after J&R's wedding. These are the guys that drove me to the supermarket, killed the ants attacking my box of cereal, changed my lightbulbs multiple times, listened to all my dramas and ....well..these are my friends. Thanks guys.