Sri Lankan Grilled Beef Kabobs

(25 minutes + marinating time, makes 8 skewers)

This is a fusion-y sort of recipe, taking a shawarma-style approach, but with Sri Lankan flavors, adapted from a recipe found in Bon Appétit magazine.

I was aiming for something I could easily prep on a weeknight and throw on the grill, and this worked really well — it takes a little marinating time, so plan ahead, but actual cooking time is minimal. It also works well with pork or chicken thighs.

(You can certainly use a more expensive cut of meat if you prefer, such as sirloin tips or anything up to filet mignon. The lime juice in the marinade here tenderizes the chuck, which can be tough otherwise for quick cooking.)

NOTE: Sri Lankan curry powder recipe can be found here; it can also be purchased online: https://serendibkitchen.com/sri-lankan-curry-powder/

zest of 2 limes
4 large garlic cloves, finely grated
1 c. mayonnaise
1 c. plain whole-milk yogurt
3 T lime juice
1 t. salt
1/3 c. ketchup
1/4 c. Worcestershire sauce
2 t. Sri Lankan curry powder
1-2 t. cayenne
3 T vegetable oil (plus more for grill)
2 lb. beef chuck, cut into 1/2″ cubes
naan bread, halved cherry tomatoes, sliced cucumbers (for serving)

1. Make sauce: In a large bowl, whisk lime zest, garlic, mayonnaise, yogurt, and 2 t. of the lime juice in a large bowl to combine, add salt to taste. Transfer 1/2 c. of sauce to small bowl for serving; cover and chill until you’re reading to eat.

2. Make marinade: Whisk into the remaining sauce the ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, curry powder, cayenne, and remaining lime juice. Add beef (or other meat), toss to coat. Cover and chill at least one hour (up to 12 hours).

3. Prepare grill for medium-high heat; oil grate. While grill is heating, remove beef from marinade, letting any extra drip back into the bowl; thread meat onto metal skewers, spacing slightly apart.

4. Grill kebabs, turning a few times, until browned and just cooked through, 6-10 minutes. Lightly toast pita on grill, and serve kebabs with peta, tomatoes, cucumbers, and reserved yogurt sauce.

Not the Most Elegant Method

This post is not for any vegetarians / vegans.

It turns out that if I impulse-buy an entire frozen lamb at Costco ($5.29 / lb), I AM capable of cutting it into small enough pieces that I can fit it in the chest freezer + fridge. Even if I only have a garden saw on hand to use to get through the bone.

Not the most elegant butchery in the world, and I got very tired and was glad that I could tap in Kevin to do a few passes with the saw near the end, but basically, I can do this. Maybe better to start earlier in the day, though. And buy a bone saw first.

I will spare you the photos. 🙂

(I might show them to my friends at Carnivore Oak Park, though, just so they can be amused by my amateur efforts. I think I’ll leave the bone-cutting to them for the most part, going forward…this is hard work!)

Also, if you need an emergency amputation by the side of the road (which I am about to watch on my current medical TV show, by pure coincidence), I think I might be able to manage it. I’ll definitely need a saw, though.

Sri Lankan Chicken Curry

This is a dish you can get in restaurants and homes all over Sri Lanka, just a classic. It’s my parents’ 50th anniversary today, and this is one of the dishes I learned from Amma. She made chicken curry probably once a week for my entire childhood, and my recipe is still pretty much identical to hers, almost thirty years later. Standing the test of time!

3-5 medium onions, diced
3 TBL vegetable oil
1 tsp black mustard seed
1 tsp cumin seed
3 whole cloves
3 whole cardamom pods
1 cinnamon stick, broken into 3 pieces
1-2 TBL red chili powder
1 TBL Sri Lankan curry powder
12 pieces chicken, about 2 1/2 lbs, skinned and trimmed of fat. (Use legs and thighs — debone them if you must, but they’ll be tastier if cooked on the bone. Don’t use breast meat — it’s not nearly as tasty.) (Alternately, use 6 pieces of chicken, and three russet potatoes, peeled and cubed)
1/3 cup ketchup
1 heaping tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
1 TBL lime juice

1. In a large pot, sauté onions in oil on medium-high with mustard seed and cumin seed, cloves, cardamom pods, and cinnamon pieces, until onions are golden/translucent (not brown). Add chili powder and cook one minute. Immediately add curry powder, chicken, ketchup, and salt.

2. Lower heat to medium. Cover and cook, stirring periodically, until chicken is cooked through and sauce is thick, about 20 minutes. Add water if necessary to avoid scorching. Add potatoes if using, and add milk, to thicken and mellow spice level; stir until well blended. (Be careful not to cook on high at this point, as the milk will curdle.)

3. Cook an additional 20 minutes, until potatoes are cooked through. Add lime juice; simmer a few additional minutes, stirring. Serve hot.

Lamb curry, saag, and paneer pizza

The finished Valentine’s Day pizza (I’m a little behind on posting! Too much cooking!) — one for Kev, one for me, very romantic. When we were living together in Philly, lo, these many ages ago, we used to go get saag at this one food cart, and it was delicious; I was thinking of that when putting this recipe together.

It was pretty filling, so we ended up splitting one, and having the other one for lunch the next day. (Which is actually what we usually did with the food cart saag too.)

Just made it on naan, which was great, though the TJ’s pizza dough would also work fine. Sri Lankan spinach curry for the base, curried lamb with tomatoes, homemade paneer. Mmm…

Lamb curry

Hm. I thought I’d posted all the components of the pizza before posting the finished pizza, but I now see I didn’t. Well, here’s the lamb curry. I basically took a deboned leg of lamb, ground it in the food processor (pulsing lightly, so as not to turn it to paste), and then curried it using the same recipe I’d use for any basic meat curry (see my cookbook  ). Well, I wanted pieces of tomato for the top of the pizza, so I used chopped tomatoes instead of ketchup, but then it wasn’t tangy or sweet enough, so I added a bit of extra lime juice and some jaggery.

Apparently I am feeling lazy about writing recipes out today, because that’s what you get. Plus pictures!

Simple Sunday dinner: steak and broccoli

Sunday dinner this week we kept simple — we had some leftover pasta from the day before, so we just added steak and broccoli. About 20-25 minutes of cooking time, and the kids (mostly Kavi) did almost all of it, with instruction / supervision.

First we got the water boiling for the broccoli, which we were going to boil this time. (Sometimes we steam it, sometimes we roast it. Broccoli happens a lot around here, as it’s the only green vegetable both kids will reliably eat.) The pot was heavy enough that Kavi had a little trouble moving it over — got to get that girl doing more household and yard work, build up some arm muscles! She plays soccer, but that is not helping her arms any. 

Kavi really loves steak, so she was pretty excited to learn how easy it was to make for herself. Rinse, pat dry with paper towels, season with salt and pepper (the kids love using the grinders), add a bit of oil. Get the grill pan really hot (toss some water on to make sure it’s sizzling, which is always fun). Put steak on pan and set timer for 3-4 minutes (depending on how thick your steak is; we were doing NY strip, so went with 4).

Check on the water for the broccoli — boiling yet? Almost. We’d already cut it up a few days before (leftover for serving with dip at a party), so that bit was taken care of. We put some dishes away, clearing the dishwasher for later use.

Okay, water at a full rolling boil, plenty of bubbles, in goes the broccoli, careful not to splash yourself with boiling water.

There goes the timer for the steaks — flip them! Don’t mess with them otherwise! Set another timer for 3 minutes. I showed Kavi how you can press a finger into the pad at the base of your thumb to remind yourself of the right level of squishiness for steak doneness — medium rare is what we all like. We pressed a finger in the steak to test — still too soft. Empty some more dishes from the dishwasher.

We were a little tight on time here, because broccoli and steak were finishing at about the same time — the broccoli got *slightly* overcooked as a result. Not enough to be mushy though, which was good, because the kids won’t eat it then! It’s hard to manage the timings perfectly when you’re also trying to teach two kids.

Timer goes off, steak on the cutting board, add a bit more salt and pepper, leave it to rest. (Important — if you cut it now, the juices will just flow out; messy, and less tasty steak resulting).

Drain the broccoli. This bit, I did for them, because the pot was borderline too heavy for Kavi to lift. I told her she could just take them out with a spatula instead; if I’d had one nearby, I would’ve had her do that, but I didn’t — poor planning on my part! Next time. I also warned them to be careful with the steam when pouring out the broccoli into the colander — you can burn your face or hands pretty easily. No good.

Broccoli back in the pot, and now Anand and Kevin have finished the dishwasher, heated up the leftover pasta, and are off setting the table and lighting the candles while we finish up. Kavi adds several pats of butter to the broccoli and gently stirs; we could’ve added some salt too, but with salted butter, didn’t feel we needed it. The sweetness of the broccoli was coming through nicely.

Then slicing the steak, making it pretty with a few of Daddy’s favorite kumato tomatoes, and off to eat. 

It was very satisfying teaching her how to do this at age 12. I basically didn’t learn to cook ’til college; I feel like they’re getting a big advantange in life here! Happy parenting.

Sri Lankan Shepherds’ Pie

Sri Lankan Shepherds’ Pie
(15 minutes cooking time + 40 minutes baking / cooling)

Usually mashed potatoes go pretty fast around here, but we made so much for Thanksgiving that we actually had some leftover. Shepherd’s pie to the rescue — but I had a long work day today, so I wanted a version that required the minimum of actual cooking.

Could I avoid chopping onions and carrots the way we usually would for shepherds’ pie, and still come up with a tasty dish? Yes, as it turned out, if I combined it with the approach we use for ginger-garlic chicken. Though if you don’t have leftover mashed potatoes, you’ll need to make them fresh, which will add a bit of cooking time, I’m afraid.

Ingredients:

2-3 cups leftover mashed potatoes
1.5 lbs ground lamb (you could use beef or another meat instead instead)
1 heaping teaspoon ground ginger
1 heaping teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 – 1 t. black pepper (or cayenne)
1 teaspoon Sri Lankan curry powder
2 T flour
1/4 c. ketchup
1/8 c. Worcestershire sauce
1 c. chicken broth
1 T lime juice
1/2 c. frozen peas
1/2 c. frozen corn

NOTE: If you don’t have leftover mashed potatoes, boil the potatoes and mash them first, before starting the meat, as there isn’t really a good pausing point during the meat-cooking process.

1. Set oven preheating to 400F. Turn lamb into a sauté pan, add ginger, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and curry powder, and fry on high until browned — the lamb should give off enough oil that you have no need for more, although do add oil if needed.

2. Add flour and stir for a few minutes, until flour is browned and the ground lamb is thoroughly coated.

3. Add ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and chicken broth; cook a few minutes, stirring, until well-blended. Simmer a few more minutes until liquid thickens into a sauce. Add lime juice, stir, and adjust seasonings to taste. If there’s excess oil, blot it up with a paper towel or skim it off at this stage.

4. Stir in frozen peas and corn until well blended. Turn off heat and turn mixture out into a casserole dish. Spread with mashed potatoes.

5. Bake at 400F for 25 minutes, until top of potatoes are golden brown. Remove from oven and let cool (and set) for 15 minutes. Serve hot.

Instant Pot Sri Lankan Lamb Curry in Coconut Milk

(1 hr, serves 8)

Cooking lamb curry in the instant pot is only a little faster than cooking this on the stovetop, but does mean that you can make it in advance, or go run an errand (or attend a board meeting, in my case), and let it keep warm until you’re ready to devour the dish.

3 TBL vegetable oil
3 medium onions, chopped
2 TBL ginger, chopped fine
6-8 garlic cloves, smashed
1 tsp black mustard seed
1 tsp cumin seed
3 cardamom pods
3 cloves
1 stick cinnamon
6-12 curry leaves (optional)
1-2 TBL raw red chili powder
1 TBL Sri Lankan curry powder
1 1/2 tsp salt
3 lbs leg of lamb, cubed, about 1 inch pieces, with some fat left on

1/2 c. ketchup
1 can coconut milk
1-2 TBL lime juice

1. In the Instant Pot, heat oil and sauté onions with ginger, garlic, mustard seed, cumin seed, cardamom pods, cloves, cinnamon and curry leaves until onions are golden/translucent (not brown), stirring as needed.

2. Add chili powder, curry powder, and salt, stirring to combine, then add lamb and sear, stirring occasionally, for a few minutes, to bring out the flavor of the meat.

3. Add ketchup and coconut milk, stir well, scraping up any bits stuck to the bottom.

4. Set to pressure cook for 15 minutes; allow pressure to release before opening. Add lime juice and salt to taste, simmering if needed to reduce liquid.

5. Serve hot, with rice or bread.