I have made lamb curry before, but I felt like doing something different today so I went a-googling. I quickly settled on a recipe from Cuisine.com.au that sounded nice, but there were a couple of fairly glaring things wrong with the recipe - seriously, it would never have worked - so I've tweaked it into something that will.
The first thing to do is get your marinade going. Mix half a tablespoonful of turmeric into a few tablespoonfuls of plain, natural yoghurt. Dice the lamb into bite-sized pieces and mix it all up. You're going to have to get your hands into that bowl, and yes your fingernails are going to go yellow.
Cover and leave in the fridge to marinade - ideally overnight, but an hour will suffice.
When you're ready to start cooking, the first thing to do is the spice mix. I often get really annoyed with curry recipes at this point, because they list all the ingredients together at the top in an apparently random order then at a certain point say, "add all the spices" and you find yourself running back and forth between the cooker and the cupboard where the spices live trying to remember which ones you've already added. My advice is to get the spice mix ready before you've got a hot pan to worry about.
So, take two tablespoonfuls of ground coriander, one of cumin and put them in a ramekin (or whatever). Embarrassingly, I'm out of ground cumin so I bashed up some cumin seeds in the pestle-and-mortar. Add one tablespoonful of poppy seeds and three of ground almonds. The original recipe calls for ground cardamom, but I've never seen such a thing so I opened up five cardamom pods and bashed the seeds in the pestle-and-mortar. Finally, some heat - today I used dried chilli flakes and a dash of cayenne pepper but feel free to use fresh chilli peppers or chilli powder if you want.
All that's left to do now is chop an onion and crush three cloves of garlic in the pestle-and-mortar and we're away.
This is a one-pot meal, so choose a nice big pan. Heat some oil and gently fry the chopped onion until soft. Add the crushed garlic and two tablespoonfuls of preserved ginger (or the equivalent amount of fresh, if you want). Add the marinaded meat and fry until browned on all sides.
This is where the original recipe went a bit wrong. It said to leave the pan on the lowest possible heat for 90 minutes... which would probably result in your kitchen catching fire, and definitely result in an inedible, burnt mess of food. No, we definitely need to add liquid here, in the form of about 750ml of stock (lamb stock if you've got it, vegetable if, like me, you haven't).
If you own a slow-cooker, you could put everything in there at this point and leave it happily bubbling away on "low" until you're ready to eat.
Chuck in a couple of cinnamon sticks, a couple of star anise, about four cloves and a couple of bay leaves. You can probably leave them out without much ill-effect if you want to.
Bring to the boil, then put the lid on, turn the heat down to its lowest setting and go off and do something else for an hour. I can never resist checking back a few times to smell and taste, and I found that it was boiling a bit more than I wanted, so I moved the pan to one of the smaller gas rings.
After an hour, peel and chop two sweet potatoes into bite-sized pieces and add them to the pan.
Add a tin of coconut milk (or coconut cream, I'm not really sure what the difference is. Definitely nothing to do with cows though) and leave the lid off so that it the liquid will reduce. When there's just enough liquid left to pour over as sauce, it's ready.
One problem with marinading in yoghurt is that you can never buy a small pot of natural yoghurt, but only enormous ones. So we need to find something to do with the rest of it, and a natural accompaniment to a hot spicy curry is raitha.
Dead simple this - just chop up a chunk of cucumber and mix it in with yoghurt, a little pinch of turmeric and quite a large pinch of mint. It's just my stab at the stuff that comes with poppadoms in Indian restaurants, which I think goes very nicely with a hot curry to take the heat away.
The curry's nearly ready now, and I felt it was a bit light on veg so chucked in a couple of lumps of spinach from the freezer. Again, not strictly necessary, but vegetables are good for you. Isn't frozen spinach the weirdest stuff though?
Pick the cinnamon sticks, star anise and bay leaves out, as well as the cloves if you can find them, and serve. This doesn't really need rice or naan bread, but go the whole hog if you want to. I do love a bit of mango chutney though.
We divided this into four portions in order to get it down to the required WeightWatchers points, with the other two going into Tupperwares in the freezer for another day. Hungry people could divide by three, but it really was plenty for us. You can always bulk it out with rice or naan if you want, or if you've got more people to feed.
I had a very pleasant afternoon slow-cooking, back in my kitchen after a weekend's camping, so I did laugh when I looked once more at the original recipe and noticed that it's labelled as Indian, Quick and Lunch. Is one out of three a good score?
I can't promise that you'll like all the recipes from this blog, but I can promise that they'll work at least - this is all stuff that we've eaten at home.
Taste verdict
Just the cooking smells coming off this were enough to have my girlfriend making orgasmic noises, and it tasted just as good. I've had worse from Indian takeaways. Pleased with this one!
Financial verdict
250g lamb neck fillet - £3.30
An onion - 20p
2 sweet potatoes - 60p
Tub of plain yoghurt - 90p
Half a cucumber - 40p
Tin of coconut milk - 80p
3 cloves garlic, 1 tablespoonful turmeric powder, 2 tablespoonfuls preserved ginger, 2 tablespoonfuls ground coriander, seeds from 5 cardamom pods, 1 tablespoonful ground cumin (or cumin seeds bashed up in pestle-and-mortar), chilli to suit your taste, 1 tablespoonful poppy seeds, three tablespoonfuls ground almonds, two cinnamon sticks, two star anise, two bay leaves, four cloves, stock cube, 2 lumps of frozen spinach - from store. Probably more than pennies this time, though.
Difficult one, this, because so much has come out of store that it's probably more than just a few pence worth, and because there's some stuff in there that I wouldn't expect everyone to have (I had to go out to get the poppy seeds and ground almonds). However, I have included the price of a full yoghurt pot and a full cucumber portion, and you're not going to use them up so I think it probably comes out about fairish. Assuming four portions, this adds up to £1.55 per portion. If you're buying all the spices for the first time it'll come to considerably more, but they will last a long time and you will use them in plenty of other dinners.
The skinny
Dice lamb into bite-sized pieces. Marinade in yoghurt and turmeric. Cover and leave in the fridge overnight if possible, or for at least an hour.
Prepare the mix of spices, poppy seeds and ground almonds.
Chop an onion and crush three garlic cloves.
Using a large pan, fry the onion gently until soft. Add the garlic and some preserved ginger. Add the meat and fry until browned all over. Add the spice mix.
Stir until everything is covered in spices.
Add 750ml of stock and some cinnamon sticks, star anise, cloves and bay leaves. Bring to the boil, then back off to the lowest possible heat, put the lid on and leave to simmer for an hour.
After an hour, chop the sweet potatoes into bite-sized pieces and add to the pan, along with a tin of coconut cream. Leave the lid off. The potatoes will be ready at about the same time that the liquid has reduced into a nice thick curry sauce.
Add some frozen spinach towards the end of cooking time, if you want to.
Prepare cucumber raitha by chopping up a chunk of cucumber and mixing with yoghurt, a small pinch of turmeric and a large pinch of mint.
When the sweet potatoes are cooked and the cooking liquid has reduced to a nice thick sauce, serve with raitha and mango chutney.
WeightWatchers ProPoints
8 (based on dividing into four portions)
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