The Dinner Files

I’ve written before about my obsession with manti, those tiny Turkish lamb dumplings. I’ve been insane enough in the past to make them and, if I’m being honest, it is highly likely that I will be that insane again.

Not this time, though. This time I got the general flavor delight by making the filling into a sauce and putting it on noodles. I got the idea from Melissa Clark, who did the same thing a few years ago. Her version had eggplant in it, which sounds good but not really so much like manti. My version sticks a bit closer to the original taste profile, with the exception of the fact that I ended up dolloping some harissa on it and being thrilled with the results. Authenticity be damned.

Is it as good as the dumplings? Absolutely not. Is it a delicious dish that was made and ready to eat in about 30 minutes instead of 3 hours? Yes it was.

Manti lamb pasta

The optional hot sauce is absolutely optional, but know that it is also absolutely delicious. Some kind of thick or even paste-like chile concoction works better than sauce-y condiments, but that may just be me.

1 pound ground lamb

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 small onion, minced

3 cloves garlic, minced (divided)

12 leaves mint, cut into ribbons

1/2 teaspoon plus 1/8 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup chicken broth

1/2 pound farfalle pasta

1 cup thick Greek-style yogurt

3 tablespoons butter

Chile powder

(Harissa, or other hot sauce type item for them that like it – while true manti are not traditionally spicy, this pasta is awfully tasty with an extra kick)

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil.

Meanwhile, pat the lamb dry. Heat a large frying pan over high heat. Brown the lamb in the olive oil. When about half the lamb is cooked, add the onion and 2 cloves of the garlic. Cook, stirring, until lamb is cooked through and onion is soft, about 3 minutes. Add 3/4 of the mint, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and pepper. Add broth and simmer until almost completely evaporated but a bit saucy on the bottom of the pan, 3 to 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta. While the pasta cooks, combine yogurt with the remaining 1 clove of the garlic and the remaining 1/8 teaspoon of salt.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium high heat. Cook until butter starts to brown. Remove from heat.

Divide pasta between 4 plates, top with lamb, top that with yogurt, drizzle each serving with some browned butter and garnish with chile powder and some of the remaining mint. Serve with hot sauce on the side for people to add themselves.

There is usually a jar of harissa – the top assiduously covered with a fairly thick layer of olive oil – sitting somewhere in my fridge. It sits waiting for me to make couscous (the dish not just the teeny tiny pasta), at which point I remember to pull it out of the fridge and dollop it on dinner.

Alas and alack, I am at the family cabin and there is no jar of homemade harissa sitting in the fridge. There are about a dozen jars of jam, four of which are strawberry. There are plenty of bottles of hot sauce, three of which are Tabasco – not even, I feel the need to add, different types of Tabasco; just three bottles of Tabasco so if, say, three people were eating they could each have their own bottle of Tabasco at the ready in case something remotely bland went down. There are eight different jars of mustard opened and ready to spread on sausages.

There are, in short, plenty of condiments. We lack not for condiments here on our little bit of Northern Minnesota. But is that good enough for me? Absolutely not. So I made some homemade harissa. Since I knew we would use the whole batch, I made it fancy, with herbs. It was crazy delicious.

Homemade harissa

If you like things hot, quite hot, toss a few arbol chiles in with the larger red ones.

2 ounces of large dried red chiles (ones labeled “New Mexican” work well here)

4 cloves garlic

4 stems of flat-leaf parsley

16 large mint leaves

2 tablespoons of olive oil

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1/2 teaspoon salt

Remove the stems and seeds from the chiles. Put them in a medium bowl and cover them with boiling water. Let that all sit for about half an hour. Lift the chiles from the water and put them in a blender or food processor (let some of their soaking liquid cling to them). Toss in the garlic, parsley, mint leaves, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. Whirl this into a relatively smooth paste-like sauce. You can add a few tablespoons of the chile-soaking liquid to thin it, if you like. Taste and add more salt or lemon juice, if you like.

Now what to do with it. Dollop it on stuff you want to taste hotter and more delicious. Steak, chicken, and vegetable stews are some of my favorites. Or, and this worked out quite well, use half of the above batch as a marinade for 1 1/2 pounds of chunks of leg of lamb, letting it all sit together for a few hours or overnight, and then grill those lamb chunks until browned and cooked medium rare. Serve with the reserved harissa.

Notice how the lamb is not all jammed onto the skewer. Notice how each lamb piece has a little room to breath. Please feel free to mimic this skewering method.

Last week, before the lefse extravaganza, one of my other San Francisco Bay Area cousins (the Watson cousins have a quorum going – four out of seven of us live in the Bay Area; if you count Monterey, which is a questionable move, the number goes to five out of seven – impressive considering not a single one of us is from here) stopped by after work to make samosas. Why samosas? We really don’t know. I taught her how to make gougères last fall (for her book club meeting when they were to discuss My Life in France – the inspirational tale of Julia Child’s time in France, including embarking on her culinary career at the tender age of 37) and we had a rollicking good time and wanted to do it again.

So we made 110 samosas. I mean, if you’re going to get a pan of oil bubbling and pull out the rolling pins out and cover the kitchen in flour, you might as well have something to show for it at the end of the day, no?

First, the fillings. One potato. One lamb. I make no claims to even the remotest authenticity. We didn’t even fill them right. We gave up and filled them like ravioli or pierogi.

Potato Samosa Filling

This is what most people think of when they think “samosa” (or, I suppose, if they think “samosa”). This filling was soft and fluffy lightly spiced and full of little seeds – cumin, fennel, and mustard – to give it plenty of flavor. If you want to make them more like samosas you get at most Indian restaurants in the States, throw in about a cup of frozen peas towards the end.

4 large Yukon Gold potatoes

Salt

1 large onion, chopped

2 Tablespoons vegetable oil

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1 teaspoon mustard seeds

3 dried small red chiles

10 fenugreek seeds

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1 Tablespoon lemon juice, plus more to taste

Put potatoes in a large pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and add about a tablespoon of salt – you want the water to actually taste salty. Cook until potatoes are tender all the way through, 20 to 30 minutes.

Put potatoes through a ricer or peel and chop – the choice is yours. My cousin “chopped” ours into a mash. It was all very even and precise. She’s a lawyer.

Meanwhile, you can heat another pan over high heat and cook the onions in the oil until they start to brown , adjusting the heat so they don’t burn before they soften. Or, do as we did and wait for that potato pot to be drained and use it to avoid washing a pot. Yes, I’m that lazy about washing dishes.

When the onions are starting to brown, increase heat to high if necessary and add the cumin seeds, fennel seeds, and mustard seeds. Cover and cook until the mustard seeds stop popping, about 2 minutes.

Add chiles, fenugreek seeds, and turmeric. Stir to combine and then stir in the cooked chopped or mashed potatoes. Cook, stirring, to keep potatoes from sticking too much to the pan (they’ll come up when you add the lemon juice in a moment, so there’s no need to panic), until flavors blend a bit, about 5 minutes. Add salt to taste if needed and drizzle whole mixture with lemon juice. Stir to pick up bits of potato on bottom of the pan and transfer to a bowl to cool a bit.

Lamb Samosa Filling

This is essentially kheema, a spiced ground meat dish that goes with rice or bread or potatoes and makes a great stuffing for vegetables that can be stuffed.

1 Tablespoon vegetable oil

2 large onions, chopped

6 cloves garlic, minced

2-inch piece of fresh ginger, grated

1 1/2 pounds ground lamb

6 whole cloves

6 black peppercorns

2 bay leaves

3 dried red hot chiles

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon

3 chopped tomatoes (fresh or canned)

1/2 teaspoon salt

Lemon juice

In a large frying pan or pot, heat oil over medium high heat. Add onions and cook, stirring, until soft, about 3 minutes. Add garlic and ginger and cook, stirring, until very fragrant, about 1 minute. Add lamb and cook, stirring as you see fit, until cooked through. Add cloves, peppercorns, bay leaves, chiles, coriander, cumin, turmeric, and cinnamon. Stir to combine. Stir in tomato, salt, and 1/2 cup water. Cover, reduce heat to maintain a simmer, and cook for about 45 minutes. Remove cover, taste and add more salt if you like, and cook off any remaining liquid. Stir in lemon juice and transfer to a bowl to cool.

You will notice that the potato and lamb samosas look quite different on their outsides and well as their ins. We baked the lamb ones – since they had plenty of unctuous tasty fat in them to keep them moist anyway.

So, onto the dough (tired yet?). Use your fingers to work 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil into 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour mixed with 1/2 teaspoon salt. Stir in 1/2 cup water. You may need to add another 1/4 cup to make a workable dough. Knead it in the bowl until it holds together as a ball. Cut into 20 – 30 pieces and cover with plastic wrap or a damp kitchen towel. Work with one ball at a time.

On a floured work surface roll each ball into a 4-inch circle. Cut the circle in half. Now you can fold the half-circle in half and pinch the cut sides together to form a cone for a traditional samosa shape and fill the cone about 3/4 full of filling and then crimp the end shut, or just fill it and crimp the edges as we ended up doing because we were so tired and lacked proper Bengali skills. Place filled samosas on a lightly floured baking sheet.

When you’re ready to cook you can either bake them for about 20 minutes in a 375 oven and/or heat about 1/2 inch of vegetable oil in a heavy pot or cast iron pan over medium high heat to 350 – 375 degrees. Fry, in batches and without crowding the samosas – until golden on each side, about 3 minutes per side. Drain on paper towels or a cooling rack.

We were total heathens who just shoved them in our mouths as we went. I really just do not want to think about how many we ate as we filled and fried. A lot. We officially ate a whole butt-load of samosas. And then some. Luckily, I had made a cilantro mint chutney. It’s chock-full of vitamin A.

You know what I hate? Parades. You know what else I hate? Parades’ ill-disciplined cousins, street fairs. I hate the crowds, I hate the noise, I hate the hassle. So you know what? I don’t go to them. For the most part this works out just fine. Once in a while some well-intentioned person will invite me to a parade or street fair and I politely decline.

But every Memorial Day Weekend I am forced to confront Caranval!. Carnaval! takes over our neighborhood. Carnaval! as you might have already guessed, largely consists of, yes, a parade and a street fair. Those are the defining events of Carnaval! as far as I can tell. Roads are closed, music finds its way through the air into our house, parking spaces are at an all-time premium, even on our quiet little street. And I am psychically and physically surrounded by parade and street fair.

And you want to know the worst part? I forget about it every year. It catches me off-guard and in-town. All of the sudden competing samba music, steel drums, and house music come floating through the air and I innocently wonder who’s having the big party. And it stays like that for a bit before reality sinks in and I realize that everyone is having the big party and I’m stuck for the weekend.

So I took my frustration out on a leg of lamb and we invited some neighbors over–no one had to drive or give up their parking spot. Brilliant!

I grilled this butterflied leg of lamb in an onion and garlic paste marinade pretty much according to this recipe I wrote for Sunset a few years ago (except I left out the rosemary). Ignore the picture with the recipe on the Sunset site: don’t roll and tie the lamb, grill it flat as stated in the directions to get plenty of onion-pasted crispy bits, which is what everyone wants. (The reason the picture with the recipe in the magazine was rolled? The food stylist thought it looked better. We had to write all these weird explanations in the captions. One editor wanted me to re-do the recipe to match the picture. I refused because it is less delicious if you roll it. I became a bit difficult over this small issue. Stubborn, entrenched, inflexible. Because no matter how pretty that picture is, you get globs of semi-uncooked onion paste in the meat if you roll it. And who wants to have their name associated with that?)

And be sure to make the yogurt mint sauce to go with it. I served it with rice pilaf and green beans. A big green salad would have been welcomed too, but we had a shaved fennel concoction with chunks of Meyer lemons in it.

But we started the meal with a beautiful piece of smoked salmon my Uncle Denny caught, smoked, and carried down from the Olympic Peninsula for us. It was a particularly fine specimen savored by all.

Ernie’s favorite part? A bit of the skin.