I’m not big in to celebrating Easter except for the obvious reasons (food and candy).  This Easter there was no big family get together so I decided to enlist The Other to make a lamb soup.  Lamb, I have learned, is traditional on Easter but soup is not.  This would be my first foray into a more adventurous soup from my Cook’s Illustrated Soup and Stew book.

The soup – officially called Irish Stew in the book – consisted of Lamb shoulder, and potatoes.  There was a variant which included turnips and carrots which I decided to try.  I thought this would add a little more variety to the soup. Although I love potatoes, my results with lamb have been mixed about 50/50.  Brutus on the other hand was just excited meat was being cooked and decided to jump on the counter ( a no-no) and photo bomb while I was taking photos #throughglass

The bad news was that since it was Easter weekend and people like to eat lamb on Easter my butcher didn’t have any lamb shoulder and the Jewel had only 1 package left.  I quickly called The Other to see if we could sucessfully scale down the soup from the required 4.5 pounds of lamb to just 1 pound.  He said it could be done and was not worried.

My two tiny lamb shoulder chops

All that’s left after removing from the bone and trimming – it doesn’t look like enough!!!!

We successfully scaled down the recipe and made enough for about 4 servings of soup.  It was awesomely delicious.  The lamb was cook perfectly and so tender and flavorful it was by far my most favorite part of the soup (again just making me sad I didn’t have more lamb!)  There was a weird aromatic in the soup which I think came from the turnips that I didn’t care for.  It wasn’t enough to not eat it but if I made this again I would leave out the turnips and just do potatoes and carrots.

The cook book also listed a complimentary quick biscuit recipe which was supposed to be easier and faster than traditional biscuits.  We did not scale down this recipe….

They turned out pretty good even though I forgot the salt during the mixing.  They were easy to work with and cooked in about 15 minutes and for those doing Weight Watchers were about 3 points each.  I am definitely going to keep this recipe on hand for get togethers and parties.  I also liked that the biscuits were small (2.5″ round) so a good option for finger food or hors d’oeuvre.