The Secret Ingredient? Mint!

The only edible thing that was near abundance in our garden became the clear choice for the secret ingredient (a la Iron Chef) to revolve our meal around earlier this week when we had a couple good friends over for dinner.

We introduced the ingredient with a simple soda water with sprigs of mint as our guests arrived.  Soon afterward, our appetizers came out of the oven - potato skins with feta, kalamata olives, and of course, mint!

Thankfully, everyone was willing to work for their dinner, because we were making homemade pasta - one of our favorite new cooking pastimes.  It's so simple and so good, and now that we've gotten into fresh pasta, it's hard to go back.

Specifically, ravioli was the dish of choice, and we'd made the potato skins because the ravioli filling called for baked potato and we didn't want to just throw out the skins.  We used pecorino-romano, lemon zest, butter, and, yes, mint in the filling for the ravioli.  This recipe was from Jamie Oliver's book Cook with Jamie.  When you're done cooking the ravioli (which he sometimes calls "cushions"), you simply have to saute the pasta for a second in butter :).

For the finale, a big shout out goes to Sierra at ForkHeartKnife, because when she posted about this delicious looking blueberry lavendar sorbet I asked about making sorbet without an ice cream maker, and she generously offered hers (PS - ForkHeartKnife is moving into a physical space - the old Take the Cake spot on the corner of Main and Liberty - and if you look through the gorgeous photos of what they've been cooking up, you'll see that you want to try it out soon.  They're also doing catering, and you can catch them at What's for Dinner? on April 24-25.)!  With her help, we made a lemon/lime mint sorbet.  You may notice on the photo that we got a bit lazy at the end and didn't let it freeze all the way.  But it was mmm mmm good.

A great dinner, with a great (not so) secret ingredient - right from our backyard!  Check out some more photos below...