How do you make dinner? [Edited]

Slightly inspired by Anna’s Twitter-spam last night about food and cooking. Slightly… <3

I spent around 30 minutes just getting my ass moving on what to make for dinner today, and I'm not even sure where to proceed. It's not like I'm uninspired, it's just that I see so many possibilities I can't do, and I have serious trouble narrowing it down to what I can do. Is that unusual? That’s how it’s always been for me. I keep thinking about all the things I want to make, or have for dinner, I have a hard time boiling it down to reality. I have these images of a fancy dinner with lots of interesting food and ingredients that I’ll fall over like an avalanche, but no cigar to do it with.

Today I was in pretty huge luck though, because after a gruelling 30 minutes of going through a mental check-list of stuff I can do and can’t my mother brought forth some meat, outer filèt (whatever it’s called again in english) of sheep, and a medium deer-steak. It’s odd how the head kicks into overdrive once you see the first step though. I’ve never been much of a planner,definately not for food, and I might have some esoteric plan in the back of my head, but I’m hardly ever aware of the sort.

My immediate thought was to chop it up and throw it into the frying pan untill it started turning black in the edges (you can make some rather wonderful sauces with salt, pepper, burnt meat/spice remaining in the pan), but then I thought of something I tasted in Crete (we hung out in Heraklion I think it was) on our last day there. We’d become pretty good friends with the people working at a local restaurant, and when we mentioned that we were leaving that day one of the waiters mentioned that we should take a specialty they’d made for today (which we picked, and it was humongously good (is that even a word?), and almost free!). It’s bothered me for a time, remembering what was actually in it. Oven-baked lamb with vegetables in it, wrapped in tin-foil I think it was, and some spices I couldn’t place. We ate way too much of it.

So that’s what I figured I’d do today, try to copy that as best I can. There’ll be some deer’s aroma with it, but I can’t see how that’ll be a bad thing, although it’s usually the lamb that’s invasive, despite the powerful taste in deer-meats. It’ll be interesting atleast. I kept the vegetables fairly reduced as well, carrot and onion. Carrots doesn’t produce much taste, but has a faint sweet aroma to it (if I remember correctly), and onion’s pretty thick in both smell and taste getting in everywhere, which is a good thing.

The spices we used is among the “Extra Fine” (In norwegian only, sorry, but you can google “Santa Maria” + “Extra Fine” for potential hits in other languages) selection from Santa Maria, in this case the ‘Chicken & Steak’ – one of my personal favourites. It’s a series I can do nothing but warmly recommend for pretty much anything. Currently keeping my eyes out for the Lime Pepper variant and Forest Blend. They look interesting.

Along with it I’m not entirely sure what to serve with it yet, or how long it’ll have to stay in the oven. I’ll come to me I hope. Planning’s not a forte with me. I did find this neat site with some recipes from Crete that I’ll peruse more thuroughly later.

Here’s the picture. Taken with my phone-camera so it’s pretty subpar, and doesn’t look half as nice as it did with my own eyes. Sorry about that, I’ll use a real one next time.