Ahhhhh I just love experimenting with some food and letting it cook in loads of hours to get it all right. Especially when there is one rainy day and you can use the hours to really let all of the flavors soak in, that is when I am the most happy making some recipes.
This time it was a curry with the influences of The Indian Healthy Recipes and making some garlic naan on the side. As always, I just take some elements out of these recipes, because I don't always have all of the ingredients present in the house or as I want to add of ditch some things here and there.
In the end you end up with a little bowl of fantastic gravy which you won't regret making.
Starting with the marinating
It all starts with marinating the lamb. For this dish I used lamb shoulder and this was straight from the butcher. I took out the greater tendons but not all of them as they also have flavor in there.
Then it was time to make a mix of the spices.
I used
- 2 teaspoons red chili powder
- 3 tea spoons garam masala
- 1/2 teaspoon ground tumeric (watch out with the color!!!)
- 1 teapsoon cumin powder
- 1 teaspoon coriander powder
- 1 teaspoon of salt
The recipe also says using fenegriek dried leaves, but hey I don't have those laying around there you know ;)
These spices together with a 1/4 cup of thick greek yoghurt already gave a nice mixture. I left that for like 3 hours doing nothing. The longer the better of course.
Then there was the cool part and the magic of this recipe. Using a crap load of wild mint from the garde also in this marination really gave it something else!
Check out how big, strong and thick the leaves are, how awesome!
Together with this chopped mint it was also time for some other spice makers:
- 2 bay leaves
- 6 cardemom pods
- 2 cinnamon sticks
- 2 star anise (cool things, just always have those in the house
Making naan
In the mean time of the marinating I also made some dough for naan. Using this recipe which I have written before there this is never a loser.
You can easily make more dough and then freeze the rest of it. The reason why I am making it again?
Well, I can recommend you writing labels on stuff that you put in the freezer. My previous naan dough ended up as pizza dough, oopsie!
But this is extremely easy to do, it is just a matter of how hot your oven can go.
The ingredients is nothing special on this and easy to get. Mix all of this and turn it into a ball.
- 500 gram flour
- 2 tea spoon sugar
- 10 gram salt
- 7 gram yeast
- 50 gram melted butter or ghee
- 175 gram room temperature yoghurt
- 175 ml luke warm water
Leave that to rise under a towel at room temperature, bake it in the over as hot as possible minimum of 220 degrees celsius and like 6 to 8 minutes.
Boom, that is the naan you want to see right? Use a brush for putting some butter on it and grinded garlic if you like. Big yummie!!
Back to the braising
I started cooking the mint and the big spices in a pan with butter (but you can also use ghee) and the smell that came from that was just fantastic. Then I added the lamb just shortly that mix Just in and out.
At the same time I was also preparing some other stuff. I had some lamb stock from a previous session frozen as well and I used this as stock. The recipe says water, but give me one good reason to not use stock
Beautiful color right? I combined this also with a bit of veggie stock because that also brings in some different flavor. Stock is a cool one to fool around with for a bit. I added this to the meat mix and set it to boil
In the time that the meat was marinating I chopped 2 big onions, grated some garlic and also grated some ginger and diced a hot pepper in there.
In a separate pan I used oil to let this start cooking this onion mix for a bit.
Now this is where my recipe turned a different way that the original one because I got confused.
After adding diced tomatoes and tomato paste to the onion mix all of a sudden they talk about spices. Spices? More? I had missed that step.
So I tossed in some random more spices in the mix in the same gist as the previous spice list and let it simmer for a small bit.
Assembly time!
Soon it was time to add all together. The lamb with the stock, and the onion tomato mix that actually makes the gravy of the curry.
With all of these things together I let it simmer for more that an hour after that until it reduced and got thicker.
So this curry was just super tasteful and together with the naan a very decent meal.
And the best part even? I was able to freeze some curry as well.
That sounds like there is an extra meal waiting for me with some frozen naan and frozen curry for another rainy day. Yummie!