Hands on Cooking Time?

It tends to be usually a fun layer added to daily cooking - the layer of taking photographs and then adding them to the blog. I do enjoy keeping the recipes in the blog, it is always fun for me to peek at an old recipe, this also tends to be helpful for me when I teach, it keeps me from re-inventing the wheel. I do sometime think that not all food photographs well, however quite often this plain looking tastes pretty good, this sometime detracts me from posting about the dish, I think I need to stop doing this.

This week, one of the dishes I made, yes when I had company was really great. It took a long time to cook, but about 30 minutes to assemble dinner. This gets me to one of the interesting elements of Indian Cooking, very often people get turned off when looking at the prep time or time taken to prepare a dish and get rather turned off. I think we should really be classifying recipes into categories of passive cooking time, (which would include things such as marinading, or like in the case of this recipe the time that was spent cooking by itself, versus active I am needed time).

Well, in anycase, this recipe marinated overnight and then cooked in the oven when I was out off the house for three hours and when I came back, I re-prepped this for 30 minutes and it was ready for dinner. I would actually highly recommend it for a weeknight, with just a little planning.

Masala Lamb Shanks

Serves 6

Ingredients

2 tbsp red chili pepper
1 tbsp salt
2 tsp turmeric
5 cardamoms
1 black cardamoms
1 large stick cinamom
1 tbsp cumin seeds
1 tbsp coriander seeds
1 tbsp whole blackpepper
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 cup coarsely torn cilantro leaves
1 large piece ginger
4-6 pods garlic
1-2 tomatoes
4 lamb shanks
Cooking Spray
1/3 cup yogurt
1/3 cup walnuts
1/3 cup raisins

Method of Preparation

1. Take all the dry ingredients - chili pepper to sugar and grind very finely, in a coffee grinder.
2. Place the vinegar, cilantro, ginger, garlic and tomatoes in a blender and grind into a purree.
3. Place the lamb, wet paste, dry spices in a zip lock bag and shake throughly and place in the refrigerator.
4. The next morning, tear a large piece of heavy duty aluminium foil and spray with the cooking spray and place the lamb and spices onto the foil and cover well.
5. Place in a 350 degrees oven and let this cook for 3 hours.
6. Cool the lamb.
7. Open the foil carefully and remove the bones from the lamb.
8. Place the meat and juices carefully in a casserole and stir in the yogurt, nuts and raisins and cook for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.
9. Serve with rice or salad or both!