Lamb - Italian Stew and Spicy Indian Cubes

I never liked lamb. It was one of the first dishes I tried when I started out learning to cook --- in fact, out of Hazan. Surprising, now that I think about it, that it failed --- I think it's the only dish out of Hazan that didn't work for me. It was her lamb stew. I had to go to the kitchen to look up the recipe again, since her book is in the kitchen since I use it regularly. But I haven't looked at this recipe since 2002 or so. So now I see that the reason I chose it was because it had so few ingredients:

Lamb Stew with Vinegar and Green Beans

1 pound fresh green beans, 1/4C olio, 3 pounds (!) lamb shoulder with bone cut into 2" cubes, 1/2C chopped onion, salt, pepper, 1/2C red wine vinegar.

Cut the ends of the beans, heat the oil, brown the lamb, take it out, cook the onion 'til it's golden, put back the lamb, add the salt, pepper and vinegar, boil vinegar for 30 sec while stirring. Add the beans, cover, and simmer for 1.5 hours (!). Add water if necessary.

I might try it again, I remember working on it as when I was a Ph.D. student, I was excited, I decided to learn to cook and decided on learning out of Hazan's Essentials of Classical Italian Cooking and Pepin's Techniques. But I remember that I didn't read the recipe through, I didn't know it would take 2 hours, I'd never prepared green beans. I was working with 3 pounds of smelly lamb! And after all that, when I tasted this lamb stew, it was too gamy. So I avoided cooking lamb since then, though I probably ate it occasionally in North Indian restaurants.

The only time I enjoyed lamb was when this chef visited a friend of ours and made lamb-burgers with mint. They were excellent.

But then I came across Jaffrey's excellent Indian lamb cubes.

Spicy Indian Lamb Cubes

3 tablespoon oil, 1.5" ginger, 4cl fine chopped garlic, 15 curry leaves if you can find them, 1# lamb 1" cubes, 2 teaspoon garam masala, 1 teaspoon ground cumin, .25 teaspoon turmeric, .25 teaspoon pepper, 1 gr chopped chili, .5 teaspoon salt, black pepper, 1.5-2 teaspoon lemon juice

Heat oil in a pan at medium-high. Add ginger, garlic, curry, and stir. Add lamb, cut the heat to medium low. Add the garam masala, ground cumin, turmeric, pepper, chili, salt. Add .75C water, cover the pan, and simmer gently 50min. Then add black pepper, lemon juice and serve it forth.

And they are spicy, not gamy, and delicious.

Indian Chappali Kebabs

I grew up on my Mom's Indian vegetarian food. Indian food is not the easiest to get off the ground, because most dishes require a mixture of spices from tray of about 8 spices: turmeric/haldi, coriander/dhania, cumin/jeera, pepper/mirch, garam masala, poppy seeds, mustard seeds/rai, cardamom/elaichi. (Recipedelights has a nice translation of more ingredients than I have heard of.)

But once you have these spices, then you can make Indian food. The easiest starch that goes with Indian is basmati rice, but I've been trying to use up my Jasmine rice and that's good also.

I don't make Indian food much --- though I grew up on it, because my Mom lives nearby so whenever I want something I phone her --- and because once I learned a little bit about how to make it, I settled for making passable dishes without much work. But the thing is, I've never learned the art of flavoring Indian food by fine tuning each spice to each dish, nor have I learned any non-beginner dishes.

I tried learning some South Indian food but I didn't progress. I never got good and fast at dosas... which is one of my favorite foods. I need to get back on that. Lately I've been working on Madhur Jaffrey's book, and it has some meat recipes.



Since growing up I've been corrupted into eating meat, and so I tried some of these recipes. I've modified her Chappali Kebab a little, because I don't eat 1.5 pounds of ground beef in a sitting, only a half pound between me and my wife. But rather than reducing everything by 2/3, which would then call for 1/6 of an egg, (which I may try at some point,) I instead boosted the amount of chickpea flour. It's not bad, but I think that much chickpea actually changes the taste, and not all for the better. The bitterness of raw chickpea makes an appearance. But they're not bad, and they're fun to make. I think in India these are made with ground lamb or goat, since I never heard of Indians eating beef. But this is what I do:

Indian Chappali Kebabs

Get the rice going (I use a rice cooker.) Thaw .5 pound of beef (I put it in a mylar sandwich bag in warm water.) Brown about 4 tablespoons of chickpea flour (besan) in your iron pan on medium, stir from time to time. Brown a little more than 1 teaspoon each of whole coriander and cumin along with the chickpea flour. Chop a small hot green pepper, put in the mixing bowl (or use powdered red chili,) and break the egg in. Leave the pan off the heat once the chickpea flour is browned. Wait until the rice is done and the beef is thawed. When that's done, then dump the beef into the mixing bowl, and then add the chickpea flour and spices (you don't want to add warm chickpea flour to the egg without the cool beef or it might cook the egg!) Heat a few tablespoons of olive oil in the iron pan, form 4 balls from the beef, flatten them into disks, and put them in the iron pan. Flip every 20 seconds, until they're done, about 2-3 minutes.

To get Jaffrey's original, which she claims to have reverse-engineered from a Manhattan take-out, use 1.5 pounds of beef, only 2 tablespoons of chickpea flour, only half an egg, and a little more coriander and cumin.