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.

Shepherd's Pie

I bought some nice grass-fed ground lamb on sale the other day. I looked at various spiced lamb meatball recipes and Moroccan lamby stews and such, but in the end I decide to make plain shepherd's pie, the sort of thing you might be served at a pub in England.

For the stew part, I browned the lamb and removed it, pouring off all but a few tablespoons of fat and adding a touch of olive oil for flavor. I browned onions and carrots next, then added some white wine and frozen peas and a mix of chicken broth and water and let the whole thing cook a bit. Oregano, maybe? Thyme? Cinnamon? Lot of black pepper, for sure. Definitely a huge handful of parsley at the end.

I made the mashed potatoes by boiling a few potatoes, semi-peeled, for a good 20 minutes or more until they were soft. I mashed them using a ricer with some butter and a good glug of half and half.

I put the stew in a pretty casserole dish, covered it with potatoes, and baked it for a while at 375 until the potatoes firmed up a little.

On the side we had a simple arugula salad with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and a lot of shaved pecorino romano.

I thought the sheepy cheese would complement the sheepy pie, and it did.

I've had sheep on the brain lately because I learned to knit. Here's my second completed project: some fingerless gloves for cold nights at band practice. They're just little rectangles of Noro Kureyon yarn, sewn up above and below the thumb.

Lamb Stew and Bread

Coming soon: thorough documentation of my first home sausage-making experiment.

For now, though, there's just this lamb stew (two lamb shanks, onions, carrots, potatoes, parsley, etc.) and homemade multi-grain bread (white flour, wheat flour, cornmeal, oatmeal, wheat gluten, honey, yogurt, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, etc.)

I'll be back late Monday with sausage tales.

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.

Fat, Cooking, Lamb, and the Big Why

There's nothing wrong with eating animal fat, says this Salon interview with Jennifer McLagan.

I totally called it. (Okay, it wasn't a revolutionary observation, but still.)

The best thing in the interview is this:

Cooking should be a skill everybody masters. I am not talking about professional cooking. Everyone should know how to make something to eat. We all have to eat, and cooking dinner should be a simple, everyday act. It should be valued, not seen as a chore or a competitive sport. It is a rich, sensual experience that we can all take part in and enjoy.

For me, that's what this site is about. It's about dinner, every night, night after night. It's about valuing food and thinking carefully about food with love and respect. Not obsession, not drama, not theatrics. We do those things, of course -- we get fancy, we show off. But we come back to cooking as a small daily attention.

There are cooking sites and shows and cookbooks out there with beautiful pictures and obsessive deconstruction of how to stuff a goose or make the perfect pancake. I read them. I like them.
But what we mostly do here is show each other what we made for dinner.

So in the spirit of the Salon interview, here's some kind of a lamb shank stew I made a few months ago and promptly forgot the ingredients of.

Full-fat yogurt with mint and cucumber...lamb shanks full of weird lamb fat and connective tissue that cook down to a silky rich stew...cinnamon, ginger, onions, eggplant, potatoes? That's about right. I love that huge sheep bone sticking out of the bowl.

Lamb Meatballs and Red Quinoa

This was a reality-based menu: no ideal recipes, just making a meal of what was on hand.

I had a pound of frozen ground lamb, so that meant I should go in a Middle Eastern direction. Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food listed a recipe for lamb meatballs baked in tomato sauce, very interesting because the lamb was bound with ground onion rather than breadcrumbs. They were light and flavorful, baked rather than fried. The tomato sauce was mixed raw and poured over the meatballs and baked another half hour, so the preparation was wonderfully simple.

I roasted some vegetables, including a fennel bulb, and mixed in a lot of fresh herbs at the end.

The red quinoa was exciting. Russell served this to us, and it is so much more interesting than the pale tan variety I've seen up until now. It had a little more texture, too.

Grilled Lamb Meatballs

Last night we drank too much and experimented with ground lamb.

Lawson made some Middle Eastern meatballs out of ground lamb, onion, coriander and cumin seeds (toasted and ground), parsley, almonds, salt and pepper, and a touch of cinnamon. But we couldn't agree on whether he should use the food processor or not, so he tried both and we compared them.

Verdict: The food-processed meatballs were much gooier, much harder to thread onto skewers, but the flavor and texture were far superior to the coarser, hand-chopped balls.

The food processor gave us a much more authentically fine, blended texture. I finally understand why Claudia Roden's lamb and beef recipes call for further mincing or processing of already ground meat -- it's a whole different thing. Unlike burgers, where the whole point is the uniform pieces of fat that melt and tenderize, or meatloaf, where excess handling makes the meat tough, lamb meatballs and other spiced Middle Eastern meats really do need to be finely minced or processed.

How convenient: the superior method is way, way easier!

The processed balls are much lighter in color because the onion was processed and distributed throughout instead of in small minced pieces.

To go with the meatballs I made some excellent Jasmati rice; a raita of chopped mint, cilantro, salt, and yogurt; and roasted eggplant slices marinated in basil, garlic, and wine vinegar from the Viana La Place cookbook you sent me a while back. So nothing really matched in country of origin but it all went together perfectly.

Spiced Lamb Meatballs and Yellow Chard

It was hard to get a pretty picture of this meal, but boy did it taste good. I bought ground lamb and made a Claudia Roden recipe in which the lamb was mixed with allspice, cumin, and coriander, and then formed into meatballs. I sauteed the meatballs with some onions and garlic, and added tomato paste to make the whole thing into a stew. We ate it over rice. It was a great recipe for a busy night in which I wandered in and out of the kitchen a lot -- sort of time-consuming, but easy and spread out.

The chard was actually the tops of some golden beets I bought over the weekend. It looked kind of tough, but ended up being tender and really mild -- Lawson said it tasted like turnip greens, and he was right. I sauteed the stems in olive oil first, then added the leaves and some red chile and garlic and a bit too much salt.

I'll be going on about greens a lot over the next several days, as I am working on a piece about collards for the Free Times. I even interviewed a local organic farmer yesterday about them. Oh, I love collards.

Dad Cooks

Dad made a couple of delicious meals this week: the Red Snapper Veracruz and salad (home-grown) pictured above, and Lahmajoun.

The Lahmajoun is a sort of Middle Eastern lamburger. We used that ground lamb Lawson bought at the Caravan market, which was very lean and wonderful.

Lahmajoun

½ pound lean ground lamb
½ onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon oregano
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon red pepper flakes

Mix together and spread on:

4 whole wheat pita breads

Top with:

4 ounces crumbled feta cheese
¼ cup pine nuts

Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes. Garnish with parsley. We served these with a dill/yogurt sauce on the side.

Not Fancy / Fancy

Last night I made a legume-y one-pot meal of the sort I used to make when I lived alone and was a vegetarian: lentils, sauteed carrots and onions, a can of stewed tomatoes, bay leaves, cinnamon, a lemon rind, and cumin seeds. I added some pasta stars at the end to soak up the extra liquid and because I was feeling silly. It had a vague, comforting flavor, unidentifiable as belonging to any particular cuisine but reminiscent of many.

I used to make things like this several times a week before I made any money and had someone else to cook for regularly. My standard 15-minute meal was adapted from a Joy of Cooking recipe: toast cumin seeds, then add oil and saute some sliced garlic and fresh ginger. Add curry powder and whatever vegetable or vegetables are on hand (really, anything -- I've used yellow squash, tomatoes, spinach, chard, asparagus, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and more, one or two at a time, and with varying degrees of success) and saute that for however long it requires. Add a can of garbanzo beans and water and a bouillon cube or some vegetable stock. Let it cook down for 5 or 10 minutes. Take it off the heat and add some nonfat yogurt with a tablespoon of flour to stabilize it, plus any of the following: chopped fresh chiles, any kind of nuts, and green onions. In grad school this would often be my only meal all day.

I still make that dish sometimes. And it's good to be with someone who appreciates such simple, one-dish, pantry-based meals. Lawson sometimes makes his own single-person standard meal for us, which involves pasta with canned clams, canned tomatoes, and whatever assortment of canned beans, tuna, capers, olives, herbs, lemon, anchovies, or leftovers he happens to throw in. He happily took the leftover lentil hash to work for lunch today.

Tonight's meal was quite different. I bought a boneless leg of lamb...I've never cooked lamb, and haven't even eaten it very many times in my life, but I love buying something new and reading up about how to handle it. It was from the yuppie health food store, so it was grass-fed Australian organic lamb, and it looked quite lovely, but when I got it out of the package, it was the ugliest, most ragged cut of meat I'd ever seen. It looked like I had deboned it rather than someone with training in such things. So my plans for a neat rolled-up butterflied little leg roast had to be slightly recalibrated. Once I'd removed most of the fat (sheep fat is weird! Waxy and crumbly and firm!), I made a sort of tapenade -- oil-cured olives, capers, garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice, but with a bunch of dried figs as well, because I have a big bag I'm trying to use up -- and kind of clumped it in the frayed crevices of the meat, then tied the whole thing into sort of a tube with cotton string. It looked surprisingly presentable. While it roasted, I made saffron rice with onions and almonds...Mireille Johnston (Cuisine of the Sun) and Claudia Roden (A Book of Middle Eastern Cooking) have very similar recipes for it.

The meal was wonderful. I can still taste the brassy, strong lamb and the musky saffron and the sweet roasted figs. I was amazed -- I've never made anything that tasted like it. The lamb was too dry at one end, and had bits of gristle throughout, but the good parts were incredible -- tender and pink and very lamby. And the kitchen still smells so good.

In other news, I bought a can of venison cat food for Ronnie, partially as a joke since it cost $.20 more than the more plebeian cat food flavors, but fully expecting her to adore it, and she turned up her nose.

Back to Morocco

Tonight we had a Moroccan meal: braised and browned lamb, Moroccan bread, and eggplant salad. I could live without the lamb. I braised it first with saffron, turmeric, ginger, paprika and so forth, and after it was tender I removed the bones and gristly parts, reduced the liquid, and browned it in the oven. Once my fingers get coated with lamb fat, I am pretty much finished with the experience, even if I like the flavor.

The bread, however, is something I make again and again. It’s a whole wheat loaf, very little sugar and no fat, with sesame and anise seeds, baked in a flat round. It smells better than any other bread.

And eggplant salad is a discovery. Our family visited Morocco in 1981, to see Aunt Betty and Uncle Mario, who were Peace Corps trainers in Rabat (you were about two years old, I think.) We stayed a week, and it was Ramadan. It was remarkably like the pictures of Iraq we see now on television, without the gunfire—such a desert, not softened by the landscaping we are used to here in Tucson. I was uncomfortable with my first experience of Muslim culture, wearing a caftan and needing to be escorted by one of the younger male cousins when I walked out of the apartment.

Later in the week, after a few days of austerity—no alcohol, that is—we went along with Betty and Mario to an expatriate picnic, and there was food and wine in wonderful abundance. We had many different eggplant dishes, and since everyone was speaking French, I was pleased to know the beautiful word aubergine.

Tonight’s salad, and most other Moroccan things I make, was inspired by Paula Wolfert’s Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco, which is worth reading even if you don’t use a single recipe. The foreword notes that Wolfert made the ultimate sacrifice in the research for the book—her gall bladder.

This salad has eggplant cubes roasted with olive oil, fresh tomatoes, garlic, onion, cumin, paprika, lemon juice, and cilantro.