Indian Lamb and Garbanzos

I've really missed cooking these last few months. I've had a lot of evening work -- mayoral debates, late nights in the office -- and haven't had time for the kind of messy, unfocused cooking I like to do. We've had a lot more pasta dishes and tuna melts for dinner. I've made good stuff, and so has Lawson, but it's been different. It'll get better after the April city election.

Anyway, last night was a completely sprawling, right-brain, organic (in the procedural sense) night of cooking, and it was wonderful.

We were going to have grilled wings, naan and salad, but it started raining. Bad weather for an outdoor fire.

I'd already made the naan dough, so I decided to build a meal around that instead. I started cutting up some lamb we needed to use, leafing through Indian cookbooks, seeing what we had and what would taste good.

Here's what we ended up with, clockwise from left:

- Swiss chard sauteed with garlic and chiltepins, finished with a big squeeze of Meyer lemon juice
- lamb with garbanzos
- Boddingtons Pub Ale
- naan
- yellow lentils with spices (cinnamon, ginger, garlic and coriander, mostly)
- pickled okra

Lawson made the spice blend for the lentils. I made the rest.

The lamb-garbanzo dish grew out of a lamb recipe in an old cookbook called "Classics of Indian Cooking." It was called Cumin Lamb but I left out the cumin, added garbanzos, left out the bell peppers, and more, so it really is a completely different dish. You could use a teaspoon or two of cumin seeds in the spice paste; I didn't use them because there was a lot of cumin in the yellow lentils.

Lamb and Garbanzos
Blend in blender until smooth:

• 1" piece of ginger
• 3 garlic cloves
• cardamom seeds from 10 pods
• 2 whole cloves
• 20 almonds
• 1 t chile powder or cayenne
• 1 t brown sugar
• 1 t salt
• 1/4 cup yogurt
• stock as needed to moisten (I used lamb cut from the shoulder, so I simmered the scraps and bones for an hour or so beforehand and used that. Chicken stock would work, too. Leftover lamb stock goes to the dog.)

Heat in casserole or Dutch oven with lid:

• 3 T butter

Saute until golden brown:

• 1 onion, diced

Add and brown:

• 1/2 lb or more lean lamb, cubed

Add the spice mixture and fry it for a while, making sure it doesn't burn on the bottom. Add:

• pinch of saffron (10 threads?)
• 1 can garbanzo beans
• Stock to moisten but not make soupy

Cover and cook on low until lamb is very tender, 75 minutes or more, adding stock or yogurt as needed.

The beans keep this from being too rich, but it stills needs to be paired with some bright flavors and green foods to balance it out.

Curry Chicken

What do you do with leftover hoppin' john from New Year's Day? You re-purpose it as Caribbean peas and rice.

And what do you do with the unexpected midwinter gift of a few fresh homegrown chiles? You make Caribbean curry chicken.

On New Year's Eve, my friend Ken showed me and Lawson his nifty greenhouse and gave us a few fatalii peppers he'd grown in it. I'd never had them before. They were like small yellow habaneros, so I thought I would use them in a scotch bonnet-worthy recipe.

I used almost exactly the same recipe as I did for the goat, with two substitutions: 2 nice organic chicken leg quarters instead of lamb, and 2 regular white potatoes instead of sweet potatoes. All else was the same: rub the spices into the meat and let it sit for a while, then brown everything and make a curry.

The taste was warm and wonderful, quite similar to the curry chicken I've had at good Jamaican places. And it tasted nothing like the goat did, despite having the same spice blend. I served it with beet greens and leftover hoppin' john peas-and-rice.

Russell's Lamb Curry

Russell made a lamb curry for us from the 660 Curries book you gave him for Christmas. It was labor-intensive but wonderful. Some of the labor was due to making batches of ginger and garlic pastes which can used in the future--so I benefited, since they're in my freezer!

We had the curry with saffron rice; an Indian peas-with-mushrooms side which I invented; yogurt and tomato raita; and pear chutney.

Russell was going to write this post himself before he left, but maybe he'll add something in the comments section.

Post Election and Post Meat

Reality set in this morning. Obama won, I'm ecstatic, but there's so much work to do! Likewise, at our house, we partied last night but there was a big mess in the kitchen and throughout the house.

Also, we happened to eat meat ("flesh" is a way better term, kind of Biblical and guilt-inducing) for the past several days, which makes us wish for fish and veggies. We had a wonderful pot of Chile Verde containing both beef and pork on election eve, can't complain about that.

Tonight I made a tofu and vegetable curry accompanied by tomato and cilantro chutney and garnished with peanuts and Thai basil, followed by fresh pineapple.

Green Curry with Flounder

Surprisingly, this was a last-minute collaboration on a night when I didn't think we were going to end up cooking anything.

I softened carrots, a few cloves of garlic, and red bell peppers in peanut oil, then added chopped lemongrass, keffir lime leaves, galangal, and Thai basil, all of which Lawson minced finely. Then I added a tablespoon of premade green curry paste and a can of coconut milk and half a can of water.

I simmered that for about 20 minutes.

Then I briefly boiled some rice noodles I'd been soaking. I seasoned the curry with fish sauce. I added 3/4 pound of flounder to the curry and cooked it for about 5 minutes. At the end I stirred in chopped cilantro and topped it with more Thai basil.

Fish Curry and Accompaniments

This was a typical Saturday night dinner for two: a green curry of fish (frozen albacore); a cucumber and tomato salad with basil, green onion, lime juice, and Kalamata olives from the Middle Eastern market; brown rice; and pear chutney from the freezer, which I made last Christmas season.

I was very impressed with the olives. I had gotten in the habit of buying pitted Kalamatas for convenience, but these were whole and unviolated, and they were so flavorful and firm.

Indian Fish Curry with Tamarind and Cucumbers

I couldn't get a pretty picture of this dish, so here instead is a cucumber plant from Lawson's 2006 garden. No good pictures from 2007 -- it was a bad garden year for the ol' cucurbits.

This curry was a wonderful surprise. I'd bought a fresh coconut on sale at the grocery store the week before, and we needed to use it quickly. I'd also bought some flounder, plus the usual assortment of buy-first-figure-meals-out-later vegetables. So Lawson found this recipe for which we happened to have all the ingredients, plus a few more. It's from Jennifer Brennan's One Dish Meals of Asia, which is one of Lawson's cookbooks I've never really looked at.

It's easier than many other curries because you can use the food processor. And it's refreshing -- not so aggressively rich and creamy as a green curry made with coconut milk.

First, mix together and set aside:
- 1 tablespoon tamarind concentrate or 2 tablespoons wet tamarind (the recipe says you can use 1 tablespoon molasses and 1/2 cup lemon juice if you have no tamarind)
- 1 1/2 cups hot water

Run through the food processor to make a paste:
- 1 onion
- 4 or fewer small fresh hot green chiles, seeds and ribs removed
- 1/2 cup fresh coconut, broken or cut into chunks, or 1/3 dried unsweetened shredded coconut moistened with some water
- 1 small bunch cilantro
- a 1" chunk of ginger

Heat in a wok or big saucepan over medium-high heat:
- 4 tablespoons peanut oil

When just smoking, add and fry until they pop open:
- 1/2 teaspoon black mustard seeds

Add and cook:
- 1 red bell pepper, sliced

Then add the curry paste and a bay leaf. Reduce heat to medium and stir-fry for 3 minutes.

Add and blend:
- 1 to 1 1/2 pounds of firm white fish, cut into 2" strips (the flounder broke down quite a bit, which was fine, but cod or something would stay together better)
- the tamarind water
- 1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 cucumber, peeled and cut into 1" chunks

Bring to a simmer, cover, and let cook for 3 to 5 minutes, until fish and cucumber are just cooked. Serve over rice.