French Tofu? Tofu Doré?

In some gastronomic exploration years ago, I experimented with the interesting impact freezing had on tofu - particularly when you drop a frozen block of tofu into boiling water.  The result is a porous, more firm item - still mostly devoid of flavour as tofu itself is, but with a new interesting texture.

Some random brand of tofu swiped from the net

The result is not unlike a sponge and as such, seemed a path towards carrying other flavours.  I made some interesting tofu-burger things, and did a chicken-burger with the sponge item carrying other flavours from powdered broth mix.  Interesting but not a staple.

When a Twitter friend (@tao23) this week mentioned dipping tofu into egg-mixture for making French Toast, this came to mind as a good evolution of that idea.  There was no reason really for me to seek out an alternative to conventional French toast, or to find a new tofu delivery system really.

Tofu is probably most often used in western culture as a substitute for something one is excluding from their diet (e.g. meat for vegetarians) but as I'm not avoiding anything in particular, this is more of a food experimentation opportunity.  It does present an appealing option towards making a gluten-free version of French toast for those who find digesting gluten a problem.

Tofu in east Asian cooking is just another ingredient. It's protein-rich and fat-free which alone makes it a good thing to try to squeeze into your diet.  As an avid bread-maker, I don't propose to eliminate bread any time soon. But I'm a big fan of variety and this seems a good means to expand on the uses for that ubiquitous block of soy-bean curds.

The technique is pretty simple - freeze a block of tofu solid, then when a pot of water has reached a good rolling boil, toss in the block of tofu.  The result, when the boil has returned, is a spongy looking block which is easily cut into a slab resembling a slice of bread.

I've used silken tofu here, and I noticed that the holes are a little larger, and the final product a little softer than if you use firm tofu.  This seems a good way to emulate different softnesses of bread, and I was happy with this outcome.

After the water returned to a boil I transfered the spongy block to a board with a spatula and pressed the water out of it.  It can hold quite a bit of liquid -  this is a great feature, as it enables the scheme of soaking stuff - like our French toast egg mixture.

In the close-up picture here you can see the neat pattern of holes made by the ice crystals. The boiling water serves to set the tofu and retain those pockets and firm up the texture.


The next step is as normal for making French Toast - lightly whip up an egg with about an equal amount or so of milk.  Add a tablespoon of sugar and a few drops of vanilla extract.   Sop up this mixture with the tofu and fry in a little butter in a hot pan.

As it's frying a good hot pan ensures that the egg mixture doesn't leak out too quickly. Tidy up the edges with your spatula to retain the tasty goodness.

For a bit of a flavour enhancement, I also caramelized some banana slices in butter - a younger banana is best so it doesn't get too soft. Just quickly brown on both sides and remove.

Here's the final result on the plate, with a bit of butter and that oh so yummy Canadian maple syrup.







Make a big stack for all your gluten-free friends and let me know how you like it.   Or make a couple for your anti-tofu friends and don't tell them what it is until they've finished.

It's French Tofu - or perhaps Tofu Doré if you want to get all fancy about it.

Enjoy! And tweet me at @ottaross if you have any thoughts on the subject.

Food at Home, Away, and On The Grass

Food, glorious food.  We don't always eat pricey, but we always try to eat good. Or, "well" I suppose. Here are a few thoughts on recent food pursuits at home, away and on the grass.

Okay, sometimes we eat pricey too, but the real goal is usually value for money.  Why eat junk when something good to eat can be whipped up in 20 minutes?  Or when there's a owner-operated restaurant (ie non-chain) nearby where they care about what they are putting on the table?

I was just cleaning a few pictures off of my camera and noticed that a bunch of them are food related. Rather than file them away, or crafting several different posts,  I thought an omnibus post with a few tasty shots and associated background would be a good way to use them.  So read on if you're in the mood for a virtual bite.

Eating at Home

Pasta - it's one of the most versatile and enjoyable of all food groups.  There are few other dishes (short of just fresh, unadulterated produce from the garden) that are so simple, yet so good.   This dish from last week was a good case in point.  It was a build-it-as-you-go thing and every bite was great.

With some penne cooked up, a little disk of pesto (made and frozen after last years basil crop) was tossed in.  The orange bits are fresh cherry tomatoes grabbed from this summer's prolific garden. The green are the flowers off this year's basil plants on the back patio.  A spicy Italian sausage was quickly fried and cut up.  I topped with parmesan and enjoyed it all with a glass of wine, and some fresh bread.

Eating While Away 

Letting someone else cook breakfast is a lazy mans tradition for, well a long time.  In Montreal a few weekends back, we dropped by "The Avenue" as we've been known to do.  Their breakfasts are elaborate and well prepared. This shot shows what the four of us were having.  For me it was an Eggs Benedict, T had pancakes with apples, K had a ham and cheese crepe, D had buttermilk pancakes.  The potatoes were nice and tasty too.

There is usually a lineup on a weekend, but we seemed to squeak in just before it formed. A nice way to start a Saturday in Montreal.

Eating On the Grass

On a nice day in the summer, food always tastes better outside.  And if you're eating outside, and have access to a red/white checkered piece of cloth, you are duty bound to have a picnic.  One of the best parts of a picnic - from my perspective - is the shopping for food items.  In a city with good markets, it is an enjoyable way to work up your appetite.   That same weekend in Montreal, we hit the Jean Talon market and weaved our way through, picking up items for our midday meal as something struck our fancy.

Here is a picture about midway through the extravaganza.  The bag (of Ontario origin!)  hides a bottle of Quebec still cider which was a nice accompaniment for the food we chose...though I was a little disappointed with it.  Probably a gewurtz would have been a nicer bottle with our snack.  There are three different Quebec cheeses in there, soft, hard and a mellow orange one that was really good.  I can rarely remember cheese names, sadly.  Some local charcuterie, some fresh fruit, some olives and a baguette were all valued participants.  There was a savory Turkish pastry with spinach in it as well.  Nearby, a cricket game was on. One of the sides wore 'Team India' jerseys and were apparently trouncing their opponents.  All-in-all a nice civilized afternoon.


With such a warm summer, my ability to keep us stocked with home-made bread has been a bit of a challenge, since I'd rather not get the oven going if I'm going to be running the central air conditioning trying to push the house in the opposite direction.  Thus I tend to wait for cool, rainy days to make some bread.  Plus, with humidity and warmth during summer,  loaves don't last as long before moulding (unlike supermarket bread so chemicalled-up so as to last for months).   The remedy is making small loaves and freezing them.   I freeze them when they are still a bit warm, and when thawed they taste very fresh, like they just came out of the oven.

Here is a set of loaves just out and cooling from a week or so ago.  They were about half and half white and brown flour then a third again as much 9 grain flour, and a handful of rolled oats for good measure.

They're mostly gone now, I'm due for another baking session this week.  Let's see what weather comes in behind Hurricane Irene as she passes by. Here's hoping for something cool.

Oatmeal Cookies

The day is dull and hurricaney.  Thought I would address the long-standing cookie deficiency of our home with a bit of baking.  The hurricane influence is just the outer arm of 'Irene' that swamped and uprooted bits of New York City.  We'll likely get a bit of rain at some point, and it's pretty gusty, but it will surely pass soon.

The cookies were easy and successful. The obligatory initial sampling went well with an afternoon cup of tea.  The recipe, for those interested:

Cream together 1/2 cup each of white sugar, brown sugar and butter.
Then add:
an unbeaten egg,
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup of quick (rolled) oats
3/4 cup of flour
1/2 cup of coconut (shredded or flaked)
1/2 tsp of cinnamon and a pinch of nutmeg

Mix it all up, spoon out globs and bake in a 350 oven, for about 10min or until browned.

The original recipe called for a 'can of flaked coconut' but that's apparently an obsolete delivery method. Can't say I remember ever seeing coconut come in cans. You could probably double the coconut without much of an issue - I found half a cup to work out nicely.  You can taste it, but still taste the oatmeal flavour.

On Loss

I don't want to make this too dramatic or precious, like I'm hoping to milk my sense of loss for some back-slapping points awarded for eloquent prose. Too much writing on loss comes across like tabloid TV performance art, so if it sounds that way I've failed.

Our first cat, Munro, was euthanized today, and I'm so incredibly sad.  We named her Munro after a trip through Scotland in 1998 where we hiked up one of the many small mountains which are called "Munros" after a guy that surveyed them all.  

A stray kitten we picked up at the shelter, we had her for almost 13 years. We picked the name before the cat, and figured it still suited her just fine, regardless of her gender.  Just lately she'd suddenly developed some breathing problems and they quickly worsened over a period of days.  The diagnosis was finally cancer and we put her to sleep at the vets today.  

A June 2011 pic of our Munro

Just a pet I keep telling myself, but everything here reminds me of her and the time we spent together.  It's remembering the silly little things that hurts now - opening the blinds together in the morning, her climbing into the sink to curl up when you went into the bathroom.  Her love of brushing her cheeks on the plastic nail brush, her adept leap up into the silly cat hammock thing I built for her.  

I can rationalize all I like, it's just a cat, and how many never have the comfortable happy home life that she had?   In some ways though, it's worse than losing a human.  A person can understand that something is happening and what the causes are, regardless of how unfair.  For a pet there's no explaining, no preparation for the end, just the stressful car ride to the vet.  

She loved cardboard, so we made a perfect little cardboard box for her and buried her ashes with some silly things she loved - an old facecloth and a piece of string - under a bit of the garden in the back yard.   As we said goodbye, we had glass of our best single malt Scotch and toasted her.   Our own little ritual burial goods and ceremony.  

A little purring bit of fluff and a little chunk of our lives are gone.  Yet, it punches a hole in my heart like through a flimsy cardboard box in which she would have loved to curl up.

A Spontaneous Escape

Midweek camping is a great treat of a flexible schedule.  I saw the weather and a gap between my various projects and so jumped at the chance to go.  The great thing is that school isn't out yet,  kids and families are still tied up, so mid-week the odds are good that you can have an entire lake (sometimes a park) all to yourself.

Frontenac Park is a great spot - all the camping is hike or paddle in.   The down side is that it is in a  weird spot. It's not far away, but awkward to get to it.  Really pushing it, you can now get there from Ottawa in just over two hrs.  Recent upgrades to Highway 7 mean it's a four lane expressway almost to Carleton Place, so that trims some time off.  The 401 route through Kingston is the other option. It's a bit quicker (maybe ten minutes) but it is one of the more boring drives you'll ever make.

I picked up a very light-weight one-person tent a few years ago for just such spontaneous solo trips as this one.  When @skatem is not available to come along its good to have a lighter, one-man tent.  It's a great little sarcophagus of a thing - good space inside for a tall person to stretch out, just enough room, and a bit of extra storage in the vestibule area.

The bush is quite wet this spring, so there were many spots where the rustic trails were mucky-messes, but a bit of creative skirting was no big effort.   The mosquitoes were visibly pretty bad, but my far-northern Ontario mojo still works pretty well, and I don't think I had any bites.  I saw many sizing me up though.  I guess when they go in for a taste, they get confused and think I'm one of them, since I was injected with so much mosquito venom in my formative years. 

The lake was very quiet, and after tent set-up and a cup of tea, I was still feeling sweaty and lethargic from the hike.  I decided to go for a swim as a pick-me-up.   The deer flies and horse flies both enjoyed that.  I have no immunity to them, and they seem to still have a score to settle from the first few of their kind that I killed in the distant north off the Ogoki river, where one can almost saddle them up.    Their modus operandi remains the same: when someone swims, they zip around your head and take bites off you when they can.  One will attempt to stay under the water as long as possible to cause confusion about where you've gone. You'll perhaps even surface elsewhere to elude them submarine style. 

It doesn't work.

I got a fire started. Just a small one - I wanted the coals for cooking.   I've thankfully transitioned from the adolescent approach of camping to burn things, though many never do.   There is instead this great satisfaction of making the perfect cooking fire now.  It's not as much about tall flames and banshee screams, but more about a nice bed of coals, with small flames in little orange caves.

I had a pork chop thawing and marinating in foil during the hike (ginger, cumin, garlic cloves, brown sugar).  I fried the chop once the fire was down to cooking speed and it all worked out well.   I used my tiny Whisperlite camp stove to boil up some pasta, then added some flavour with our home-garden basil pesto.  I had sacrificed a bit of weight for a glass of wine, of course.

After supper I built the fire back up to flames, and boiled some water on my little Whisperlite for another tea, and watched the daylight fade out.

We're approaching the end of spring, and as such the days now are big, never-ending things.  There is still light in the sky at 9:30 pm, 10:00 even, and twilight is slow and long.   Last night it was particularly blue-tinted as well.   A couple of grainy phone-camera pictures illustrate.  The pictures capture that hue pretty well - with a bit of adjusting.  There is no mobile reception out there, so my mobile served little other purpose than taking a pics.  I skipped bringing my digital camera to save weight, but I wish in retrospect I'd brought it along.  I've been out many times, and thought there wouldn't be much worth shooting that I hadn't seen before.  But when you're out your perspective changes.  This stuff never gets old, despite what you think before leaving.

I might have grabbed a picture of the low-flying flock of Canada Geese that cruised past after supper.  I could hear them in the distance approaching, like a bunch of cocktail party rejects, gaggling and glorking as they went by about five metres off the water.    I could have probably got some better pictures of the little brown squirrel removing and sampling the fungus off the end of a log.  He really liked that stuff - I didn't know squirrels liked anything other than the seeds of our back-yard elm tree which they shred with glee.

Darkness set in, and no sooner had I put down the fire for the night, than the emerging stars were washed out by a full yellow moon that appeared unexpectedly through the tree line.  It gradually crept up into full spot-light mode.  Quite a surprise - I hadn't planned my trip around that, and I wasn't paying attention to moon phases lately.  It seemed almost orchestrated to my evening schedule.

Just to add to the moment, unmistakable calls of a whippoorwill across the lake punctuated the stillness.  They are a fondly remembered bird from my northern childhood too.   My attempts earlier in the evening to call loons in had gone unanswered, but as the sun finally faded to black, a couple of talkative loons started up for full Canadiana effect. They were on a tour, no doubt, adding ambience around all the lakes in the park.

I'm not a birder, in fact I might have said something to the effect of "if I ever start identifying birds someone shoot me" in the past.  So other other diverse winged beasts went nameless, though I'll add them to my 'life-list' anyway:  small feathered bird, another small bird, with wings, etc.

By 1:30 am the full-moon was up in the middle of the sky, and it felt almost like a hazy afternoon - but the silver/blue version.  Not great for someone who likes pitch-black for sleeping - but that's how I know what it was up to at that early hour.  But still, it was a very unique and memorable image.  I knew my phone-cam wouldn't be up to the task so I didn't bother.   It was so 'unicorns and elves' out that I broke out a black-velvet canvas and did a couple of quick paintings.   Well, not really, but it was that sort of thing. Weird, isn't it,  how nature can get so strikingly beautiful as to approach tacky?  Autumn is a bit like that.  I think to take pictures but decide - no this is just going to look like a road-side diner laminated place-mat.   So, I just look, enjoy and remember.

It was colder than I had expected out there last night.  I'd brought my summer sleeping bag - a tiny, lightweight thing  rated to +7C, so it says. One never believes those things, and so I had along also my silk (yes, silk) sleeping bag liner which is a great comfort enhancer. Rather than sleeping in contact with nylon, you get this with a bit of extra flexibility for adding a degree or two of comfort.  Even then, though, it was a little chilly by morning, but not so much that I wanted to break out the reflective 'emergency' blanket.  I just put on my sweater and toughed it out.

By 5:00 it was light already.  The nights are pretty short this time of year.  I managed to doze for a couple of more hours then got up for a pancakes and sausage breakfast.   A secret to success in this department we discovered a few years ago.  Make pancakes from scratch before leaving home, and freeze the batter solid.  It makes a good ice-pack and makes the pancakes much more tasty!  I much prefer these to the powdered 'just-add-water' pancakes whose texture always seems to be crumbly and taste rather artificial.   Of course, some good Canadian maple syrup is de rigueur.  I feel good eating maple syrup in the depths of the 'forest' - feels like you're bringing it back home again.

A long sweaty hike out, finally, as the day once again crept up towards 30C.   There are signs of wind damage here and there, I had noticed on the way in.  A few very large trees had come down. Their leaves were still leathery and wilted - not yet gone crispy, so they've probably been felled just in the last week.   One big one left a very curious strip of bark hanging, from where the trunk had sheered off, probably eight metres above ground. When you look up through it, it's like a hole through the tree canopy to the bright sky. 

Lots of wildlife along the way too. The ubiquitous squirrels and chipmunks and birds (feathers, beaks etc).  Several frogs and toads were enjoying the mucky conditions and high water.   This part of the country is Canadian Shield - much like the area where I grew up and did my my first camping and canoeing, north of Lake Superior.

Hiking along here, I feel like I'm out whale-watching, with enormous rocky whales cresting through the loamy ground, because the rocks have that shape about them.  You often come across a garter snake sunning itself on the pink granite in the dappled sunlight.

Some fresh new beaver dams had inundated a chunk of land I remembered as only a little swampy previously.  One creek that drains a nearby lake was really rushing loudly where it plunges down into a ravine between the rocky slopes.

A couple of deer showed up out of nowhere. I'd seen tracks earlier, but this one leaped out and stopped in the path.  I put a tree between me and him so he couldn't see me creep a bit closer and got a picture before they took both off.  Can you see them in there?

For the drive home, I took the less interesting route along highway 401 to re-verify if it was appreciably quicker than the Highway 7 and 38 route I usually take.  Plus the approach to the park from the northern route is under construction, so I thought I'd avoid the delays.   It doesn't save much time, as I mentioned earlier, and is so bland a drive as to counter-act the enjoyment of time spent living slower in the bush, so I'll likely stick to the other route.

This trip seemed appropriately timed on the boundary of spring and summer.  I've camped in this area in every season, and it has as much to offer in February snow as it does on a hot summer day.  Spring with that verdant green everywhere and fall with the colours and stark forms of leafless trees are no less enjoyable.   It's pretty out there, and a good reminder for us all what being a Canadian was like originally.

Talking to park staff in the office, before heading out, it sounds like the weekends are booking up pretty quickly these days.   Everyone that gets out probably sees something different in the trees and lakes based on their own experience with the bush - that's 'forest' if you're a city kid.   From the marks left-behind by campers who are less concerned about leaving no trace to beautiful unexpected moments captured like a bug in amber, it's a reflection of the diversity of life, and the people around us every day.  

When the sun was just rising this morning, and the lake was like glass,  I lay looking out at that perfect mirror effect along the opposite shore.  It makes me think of that Gordon Lightfoot song and the line about when 'the green dark forest was to silent to be real.'  The reflected form was silent, and from my vantage point looked vertical, like some abstract sculpture - alien and unreal.

I guess it's okay if other people want to go and use my lake on the weekends.  I suppose I can always try to scare up another free Wednesday.

2011 Census Completed - Step 'F'

Some might say that our attention spans are dictated by what the news media do to us - with stories that linger in the TV, radio and newspaper lineup for a day or three at most. On Internet based outlets, those cycles are even shorter.

It may well be that those news outlets are merely reflecting our short attention spans back to us.  We lose interest in a story, no matter how significant, in a short time, and thus the number of hits on the associated news website articles drop off, and the media organization moves on.

Even a momentous event like the nuclear partial meltdown and murderous tsunami in Japan, just a scant couple of months ago, has now disappeared from the headlines of pretty much all news outlets.  The people don't have new homes, the reactors aren't much better off.  One would think the same people who were concerned about a nuclear disaster would want to hear about the steps that have gradually contained the damage. But it's not really the case.

Several months ago, in the summer of 2010,  we heard about how our government was acting to eliminate what is perhaps the most important source of data on Canada and Canadians - the mandatory long-form census. By doing so, they are creating a discontinuity in the continuous, track-able data history on which diverse decisions are based, such as where to put schools, how to allot medical services, where businesses should locate new or expanding operations.

This story too has dropped out of the headlines.  But we should continue to remember and keep the pressure on to make it right. It won't likely happen soon, but with any luck this period will only be a gap in the data in support of rational decision making, not a precipice off which our awareness of our own country fell.

You don't need me to make the case for why eliminating this data is a stupid idea. You can also draw on your own conclusions for why a government, often accused of being authoritarian and ideology-based, would come to such a conclusion.  Or just Google a bit, you'll see all the arguments on the record.

On filling out my 2011 mandatory short-form census online today, I took advantage of the comments box at the end of the brief interaction to register my dissatisfaction:

On the off-chance you haven't filled in your own census yet, I'd encourage you to make your thoughts known through this channel as well.  It will of course, have no impact, other than to tell statsCan employees that we support building our country's future based on intelligent, evidence-based reasoning, and not obfuscating the facts to support an arbitrary government agenda.

But maybe there is some potential for a trickle-up of this important concept.

About to do your census?  Did you get to the last step, Step 'F', and can't think of what to write? Copy and paste, or copy and edit my not-so-eloquent words to your own liking:

I am disappointed with the federal government's position on the long-form census. The decision to do away with that census suggests a lack of understanding that data is necessary for the efficient and intelligent running of our country. I fear that the long form census has been eliminated as a mandatory questionnaire in order to advance an ideological agenda that may take an opposite path to what an evidence-based, reasonable, common-sense approach would dictate. 

Long Weekend Cooking and the Pursuit of Flavour

This post serves two purposes to reminisce about a nice meal yesterday, and capture some particulars for potential repeats of the result in the future.  Perhaps it is also useful for someone looking to cook up some lamb and hunting for ideas - that's great if you can make use of something from our nice meal.

Our annual purchase of a local lamb arrives around June each year, and, of course, comes complete with the leg sections called the shank - a cut that benefits from a moist, slow-cooked approach.  Here in Ottawa, Canada it's hard to find a better example of a well cooked lamb shank than the Topkapi restaurant on Preston Street, where a slow cooked lamb shank is served on Turkish style on an eggplant purée that is itself spectacular.   If you're hungry after reading this, that is a good solution to sate the pursuit of similar tender goodness.

In mid-afternoon yesterday, I knew our options for slow-cooking were quickly disappearing, and so I leaped to action.  Though the shanks had been extracted from the freezer and were pretty much thawed already, we hadn't really planned much.  Around lunch time I had thrown together some basic marinating elements - rubbed them with sesame oil and a bit of soya sauce, then some ginger, cumin, powdered rosemary and garlic, and added a drizzle of red wine. Over the next couple of hours the meat awaited action and a plan.  At 4:00, time a-wasting, I decided to act, and thought about what I wanted to create.  The basic idea of a moist low-temperature deal was there to get the tender fall-off-the-bone result.  Also the thoughts of how lamb often does well with a Moroccan tagine vibe.  That meant a mix of spices like cinnamon, coriander, ginger, fennel and star anise, to me.  But important as well is that sweetness of dried fruit, and so some prunes and dried cranberries fit the bill.   Most of those things were around in our kitchen, so I jumped in.   

A moist baking process can result in something akin to boiled meat, so an important first step is browning.  Molecular gastronomy greats like Hervé This will be the first to tell you that "sealing in the juices" is a total crock.  Browning doesn't seal in anything, but it sounds good.  And just saying something often doesn't make it so - in spite of what our local CPC political party attempts to do in our current federal election.

I suppose it says something about the enjoyment of food in my life that sitting here at my computer I can reach over to grab Hervé's book "Molecular Gastronomy" at a moment's notice to bag a quote.  By the way,  it is a good read, that book, but sadly an awkward translation. Still one learns a lot, in spite of the convoluted run-on sentences.  At any rate, Hervé quotes a few examples of the seared meat, juice-sealing idea, ending with:

"...the great French chef August Escoffier (1846-1935) wrote in his book for home cooks, Ma Cuisine(1934) that the purpose of browning is 'to form around the piece a sort of armature that prevents the internal juices from escaping too soon, which would cause the meat to be boiled rather than braised.'  [These] views are mistaken. Not only does teh notion of 'pores' have no anatomical basis, but measurement shows that the loss of juices actually increases with cooking."

He goes on about this, thoroughly convincing me, at the vary least.   Searing does greatly help the texture, appearance and flavour of the meat, and those are good reasons alone to go brown it before progressing.

A challenge in the context of lamb shanks is that the searing process is made difficult by the shape of the cut.  It is hard to lay flat on a frying surface, and thus getting a nice browning is made impractical.  The blow-torch from my plumbing tools to the rescue - er, I mean my kitchen torch, yeah, my kitchen torch, to the rescue.  

 With the flame set fairly low, I was able to give the outer layer a good browning, quickly.  

Thus browned, I sliced up an onion and threw it in the baking pan, and added a large can of tomatoes (we've just used the last of last summer's home-canned tomatoes that were so great all winter - thanks to @skatem).
In went the aforementioned spices and just a small sprinkle of salt and pepper.

I am keenly aware of the thermal mass challenges in slow cooking - you can waste a lot of time just getting the mass of meat up to cooking temperature, so four minutes in the microwave served to just warm the two large shanks and a small one up somewhat.  I also started the oven temperature at 425°F (220°C).  Throwing the pan into the chamber of cookage, I lowered it back to 300°F (150°C) after about 10minutes.

Here's a shot of the pan just going in. You can see the onions, prunes, and cranberries. Oh, yeah, I put in some black olives as well, just to keep it well rooted to the edge of the Mediterranean.

If you're doing this yourself, just wing it a bit. With oregano and thyme you can bring it around to a bit more of a northern Mediterranean feel probably.   I think a key ingredient though is the star anise.  It adds a key component to the flavour and for my money enhances the cinnamon taste nicely, and says Morocco.

Meanwhile, lamb working away, I figured two hours should be just enough time to quick cook some dried chick peas to make the cous-cous more authentic.  You cover the dried beans well with some salty water and bring them to a hard boil, then turn it off and let them sit for an hour.  Then top up the water if necessary and simmer for another hour or so.

In the last ten minutes before everything is ready, do a couple of things.  You've been checking the lamb rotating the meat a few times all the way along to ensure it's cooking evenly.  Just before it's done, it is split and nearly falling off the bone.  Haul up as many tomatoes as you can to sit on top of the meat, and with the lid off, let them cook there a bit. The result is that they dry and even caramelize a bit, approaching the consistency of sun-dried tomatoes.  Yum.

The other step is to get about 30% more broth than couscous into an over-sized measuring cup and zap it in the microwave until it boils.  Add a bit of olive oil (I used avocado oil for kicks) - add about a tablespoon to the broth.  Spoon out drained, cooked chick peas into the broth, then dump in your cous-cous, and cover the cup with plastic (and a towel like a tea-cosy to keep it warm).

Pull out the baking dish, and give it a stir up to mix the now firmer tomatoes back in - it looks something like this.
No, wait a minute, it looks exactly like this.

By the way, your house/apartment/yurt smells absolutely spectacular by now as well, and you're really hungry and that bottle of wine you had sitting aside may be suffering depletion.

Your cous-cous should also be ready.  But here's a twist.

My partner in crime, kitchen and life in general, @skatem, thought to add something in the green shade, and chose some okra she had picked up the day before.  Slicing that up she fried it in butter and olive oil until browned and slightly crispy, and we added that on top of the cous-cous after plating.

The result is this delicious item pictured here.  Some stuff to notice, given you can't taste this picture - the chick peas are firm and tasty - I think a step up from the canned ones, but you could probably use them in a pinch. It would save you a bit of time. Perhaps throw them into the broth when you're heating it up, before adding the cous-cous.

Note too the fall-off-the-bone tenderness of the lamb.  If under-cooked, the shank-meat can be rather tough, so this is a great solution for those cuts of lamb.

Perhaps we could have plated onto one of our large plates instead of the wide shallow pasta bowls we used here. While containing the sauce and cous-cous nicely, the large shank might sit more nicely on a flat plate.

I had a bit more sauce with my cous-cous at the end - oh and what the heck, here's another picture from another angle.

I guess I am mostly blogging about this (I have gone on a bit, haven't I?) because it was one of the best things from our kitchen in recent memory.

With the meal we had a good solid red wine that complemented it well.  It is called "Butcher's Gold," and is a Sangiovese/Shiraz blend that I hadn't tried before.  Some nice structured tannins in there that stood up well with the lamb flavours, and the fruitiness you find in a good decent shirazs complement the dried fruit in the dish as well.

We wrapped it all up with a small plate of cheese (extra old cheddar and havarti) and a few grapes.

Then a bit later, a press-pot of Columbian dark roast (tho' decaf) and a pair of dark, dusty cognac truffles.  It was after all Easter, and a bit of chocolate was in order given the traditions of the day. 

There it all is - a nice weekend meal, and really, the preparation wasn't a huge challenge from an effort point of view, and everything was thrown together without for recipes, just in pursuit of a family of flavours.   All the ingredients were things we had on-hand around the house,  though the wine, grapes and okra were all fortuitous acquisitions by @skatem leading into this long weekend.