This past Mother’s Day, I spent a few days with my daughter on a short getaway to Santa Cruz. Of course, on the agenda was tracking down all the yummy places to eat :-) On our first night in town, we went straight to the highly recommended Laili Restaurant (good reviews on Yelp and highlighted in our B&B’s downtown guide), which serves a blend of Mediterranean and Afghan cuisine.

My daughter was on a lamb kick that day (we had Greek skewers earlier for lunch) and quickly chose to order the braised lamb shank. I ordered the more simple-sounding trout, which surpassed my expectations, but the lamb shank stole the show. It was literal fall-off-the-bone type meat and we spent the rest of the meal analyzing the sauce. This dish was definitely a candidate for recreating at home!

A point of note: while I worked as a detective-like recipe developer for restaurants and food businesses for many years, these days I never try to completely replicate recipes. Simply put, it’s just more fun and creatively expressive to use the original inspiration as a base and add your own personal twist to things. Here’s how I “creatively recreated” the lamb shanks we had at Laili, and how you can apply it to your restaurant cravings too:

Use your Senses to Analyze & Recreate Dishes

Sight: To start off, simply pay attention to what the dish looks like. What colors are present? Is it predominantly red? Green? Colors can tell you a lot about the ingredients used. Laili’s lamb shanks sat in a reddish-brown sauce, while the meaty parts under the sauce looked a rich brown on the outside.

Smell: Before you have a bite, your sense of smell is already at work. Herbs, spices, and other fragrant ingredients can be detected by focusing on aroma before the morsels even hit your tongue. For the lamb shanks, we smelled some classic Mediterranean spices and I was reminded of the scent of a hearty stew simmering on the stove.

Taste: Quite obviously, tasting the dish helps tremendously in figuring out its components. As the lamb shanks were clearly covered in sauce, that was the first thing my tastebuds picked up on as a I took a bite. There was no mistaking the acidic hints of tomato, flavorful spices, and basic sauté elements (garlic, onions) to round it out.

Touch: You don’t have to necessarily poke the food with your finger for this, but you could if you wanted to :-) Analyzing with your sense of touch can be done in mid-bite. This is more of a reminder to pay attention to the texture, which gives you great clues as to how the dish was cooked. Is it crispy? Tender? Saucy? The lamb shanks were tender to the fork and even more so in the bite–this was no 30-minute concoction. A slow, hours-long simmer in Grandma’s kitchen seemed more like it.

So here’s what I came up with:

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While the dish was served with Kabuli rice at the restaurant, I opted for a side of green lentils for my home version–just rinse and simmer in some chicken stock for about half an hour for a simple yet still Mediterranean pairing. When the lamb shanks are ready, set each on a bed of lentils, cover with sauce and sprinkle with chopped parsley. Great to come home to at the end of the workday or easily scaled for a weekend feast!

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