Tried an experiment tonight — usually when I make Sri Lankan Beef Smoore, I use chuck. But brisket was on sale (half the price of steak), and I couldn’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t work — just maybe take a little longer, so I’d need to start a little earlier?
So I tried it, and it was good. It’s not quite as sliceable as chuck, which usually ends up with a roast beef kind of consistency — when you slice this, it shreds some. Yet I didn’t cook it so long that you can easily use two forks to shred it the way you might normally with brisket. (Maybe another 30 minutes would have gotten it there.)
So it ended up a texture that’s sort of neither one or the other…but a deliciously tasty texture, easy to eat with your hand. Kevin did fine with a fork. 🙂
I spent most of the day hauling stuff around the house in a big re-org, and stayed up most of last night nursing Kavi (so tired!), so I wasn’t really up to cooking anything else.
But I’m thinking I’ll save this to put out at the potluck we’re hosting on Sunday (Kavi is FINALLY on the mend from her traveller’s bug, so we should be an illness-free house by Saturday, knock wood!), and tomorrow I’ll make a veg. or two to go with it. It could use a cabbage & coconut mallung, or a bright carrot pickle, or a fresh kale sambol…
Recipe is in my Feast of Serendib cookbook. This took 2 hrs marinating time + 2 hr 15 min. simmering time. You can also cook it in an Instapot to speed things up — link below.
I mostly had a grounding-myself day today — spent some time straightening the basement studio (lots more to do, alas), finished some jewelry pieces (I like the new rectangle-in-rectangle style!).
Also made a nice pasta salad for dinner, with a white-balsamic, garlic, basil, and thyme dressing, with salami, fresh mozzarella, and grilled peppers and red onion (including one orange pepper from our garden). Plus some roasted potatoes with rosemary and garlic.
Sadly, I can’t share the food with you! But the jewelry will be down at Berwyn Sprout by the end of the week, unless someone claims it here first.
One of my favorite snacks is mas paan (buns stuffed with beef and potato curry) and malu paan (buns stuffed with fish curry). It is very comforting, having a few dozen in the freezer, knowing that you can pull one out whenever you’re having a curry craving, and just toast it up in the toaster oven and enjoy with a nice hot cup of sweet milky tea. Perfection.
I did develop a dough recipe for the cookbooks, but the truth is that I never actually make it from scratch. I just buy frozen bake-and-serve dinner rolls at the grocery store and use those.
I recently had both beef curry and cabbage varai on hand, and I thought they might go well together — Dear Reader, they are DELICIOUS in a roll, and now you’ve got entire meal in there, with a veg. as well as the bread and meat. Perfection. I also tried cooking some carrot in with the beef and potato, and that worked great too. (I recommend at least two rolls for lunch. Three or four if you have a hearty appetite.
If using the frozen rolls, follow the instructions on the package to let them thaw and rise. Then tear them open and stuff them with curry and shape it into a ball again, with the seam on the bottom. It’ll look lumpy, but don’t worry about it, and don’t feel like you need to let it rise again — just pop those in the oven for 15-20 minutes, and they’re good
Hmm…I think I need some breakfast.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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…
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!
