Sunday Dinner: Lamb Tagine & Monkey Bread

It's starting to get very cold here- I broke ice chunks out of my hair after my walk to work this morning. Having spent so much of my life in Florida, I spent a lot of my time in New York and Cleveland complaining about the cold weather. I accept it now- it's time to hibernate and I embrace it. 

For Sunday dinner, I decided to make two things that evoke "holiday" to me- a lamb tagine (for the sweet, spicy scent) and monkey bread (because, cinnamon and butter and see below). 

This tagine is called Liz's Lamb Tagine (yay) and it's close to my heart not for the name, but because it was the first meal I made for one of my favorite dinner guests, Kate (in my teeny tiny galley kitchen). Like most of what I make, this is a very low-work/high-yield meal- there's a lot of chopping, but once you're done with it, you can walk away from the simmering pot and go about your life until it's finished. I also tried something new- as the author suggests, I used chicken broth for the couscous (my own! I just made my very own broth for the first time) and it made all the difference in the world- the couscous was so different from what I usually make. 

I took pictures of the finished meal but they look awful, so I won't include them. 

So, what to do as the tagine is stewing? I decided to make monkey bread, mostly because Matt loves cinnamon rolls so much and the recipe is so close to that of a cinnamon roll (especially if you include the dipping sauce, which I did not because of a lack of bourbon). 

This recipe is insanely easy (I used this one) yet I still managed to screw it up (baking is really not my strong suit). The result was very ugly, yet very delicious monkey bread. The recipe specifies that the bread tastes best eaten immediately, which is good because we ate almost half in one evening...

Take the monkey bread of out the oven and let rest for no more than 5 minutes...

Then, invert!

The soundtrack to all this was eclectic- I was in a christmas-y mood when I began so I had to listen to this. Then I listened to my two latest band obsessions as kind of palate cleansers- this and especially this.