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Irish Lamb Stew and Icebox Cookies

There are hardly any I-themed ingredients.  Almost everything is prefixed with Irish, Italian, Indian or Ice.  Idiyappam is an indian rice noodle dish, but we didn't have the equipment to make it properly.  So we settled on Irish stew and Icebox cookies.

I suggested that we make our regular Irish beef stew, but Mary insisted that we do something a little different than usual.  So we found a lamb stew recipe.  Here in the US, not a lot of people eat mutton or goat, but from what I understand, those two meats are fairly common in other countries.  I like lamb, but not if it's in any way rare.  Lamb made like roast beef?  Bleah.  Cooked into a stew.  Heck yes!  I think the flavor was somewhat off-putting for Mary, but I liked it just fine.  It was really, really fatty, and that was even after Mary cut off a ton of excess from the lamb shoulder we got.  And I'm sure it doesn't help that there was also bacon in there.   Mmm, bacon.  But I'm sure it was somewhat authentic.  Good, hearty, fatty foods for northern climes.

Irish Lamb Stew

adapted from http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Irish-Lamb-Stew/Detail.aspx

1 pound thickly sliced bacon, diced
2 pounds boneless lamb shoulder, cut into 2 inch pieces
salt and pepper to taste
1/3 cup flour
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 small onion
1/3 cup water
3 cups beef stock
1 1/2 teaspoons of sugar
1 bunch carrots
3 yukon gold potatoes
1 teaspoon dried thyme
2 bay leaves
1 cup of Guinness
Place bacon in a large, deep skillet. Cook over medium high heat until evenly brown. Drain, crumble, and set aside.

Put lamb, salt, pepper, and flour in large mixing bowl. Toss to coat meat evenly. Brown meat in frying pan with bacon fat. 

Place meat into stock pot (leave 1/4 cup of fat in frying pan). Add the garlic and yellow onion and saute till onion begins to become golden.

Deglaze frying pan with 1/2 cup water and add the garlic-onion mixture to the stock pot with bacon pieces, beef stock, and sugar.

Cover and simmer for 1 1/2 hours.  Add carrots, potatoes, thyme, bay leaves, and beer to pot. Reduce heat, and simmer covered for 20 minutes until vegetables are tender. 

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The icebox cookies turned out to be really familiar to me.  They were from one of our older cookbooks, back when they weren't called refrigerators, but iceboxes.  And the cookies tasted just like some that my late grandmother Jane Avinger used to make.  Thin, crispy, with nuts in them.  So we looked more closely at the recipe, and it was from Spartanburg, South Carolina, where my grandmother spent lots of time.  I'm going to have to talk to my mom, and see if she has Grandmomma Jane's recipe.  Then we can compare them.

Simple meal.  Plenty good.

H

Hebrew National Hotdogs, Homemade Hummus, and Suji Halwa

Our response was instantaneous when we asked ourselves : What do we want to make for our H-themed meal?  Hummus.  Spell it however you'd like, but it's the same thing, and we like it.

I started putting hummus on my hotdogs as a condiment about a year ago, and I came up with the idea all by myself.  I'm sure someone, somewhere, has done this sort of thing forever.  And I know that meat+hummus+bread is commonly referred to as a Gyro.  It's not much of a stretch, really.  But I'm glad I discovered it, and as a middle-eastern/western fusion food, it works pretty darned well.

How we started eating Hebrew National hotdogs is an odd tale.  I remember my brother-in-law and I were shopping for grillables on one occasion few years back, and we were looking for sausage-like meat that didn't have lactose or casein.  I had noticed that almost every mixed-meat-in-a-casing product had milk products involved, and since I am lactose intolerant this made me a little grumpy.  But then we realized that kosher laws don't allow for the mixing of meat and milk.  Voila!  Kosher hotdogs!  They're skinny, tasty, and they completely screw with the dogs:buns ratio.  Buns always come in packs of eight.  Hebrew Nationals always come in packs of seven.  I guess that just means you have a free bun for your vegetarian friends and family.

So on to the topic of hummus.  As I may have mentioned, I never ate "ethnic" foods until I married Mary.  And hummus wasn't a food I instantly fell in love with.  Not all hummus is created equal.  There are so many varieties and textures, so many vegetable additives, it's easy to concoct one I won't be too fond of.  Sadly, I think the Forty Spices hummus at the grocery store finally made it a permanent part of my repertoire.  That, and the Mediterranean Deli on Franklin Street.  My sister-in-law would claim that Neomonde is better, I think.  But whatever.  Hummus is good.

Making it from scratch, however, requires a powerful food processor and a lot of experimentation.  We looked up several recipes online, and they varied greatly from one another.  Here's what we used this time.

2 cans of garbanzo beans (chickpeas)
2 tablespoons of tahini
3 tablespoons of red-pepper-infused olive oil
4 tablespoons (1/4 cup) of lemon juice
6-7 small cloves of garlic, raw
some fresh-ground black pepper

Anyone who's ever made hummus can probably spot some serious flaws in this recipe.  I'll mention the shortcomings as we noticed them in the final product.  First, using that much raw garlic was a bad idea.  It didn't make the hummus inedible, mind you.  It just made it taste earthy and raw.  There was a slight flavor of dirt.  Not ideal, but not a dealbreaker.  Second, the consistency was pretty firm and thick.  It wasn't smooth.  I'm not sure whether we should have used more oil, whether we should have added a litle bit of water, or whether our food processor wasn't up to the task of nearly liquefying two cans of chickpeas.  Our skill at making hummus is still pretty basic, and has a lot of room for improvement.  So if you have suggestions, let us know.

The end result was still pretty decent.  We fried up the hotdogs in a pan of ghee, and then dolloped on a bunch of hummus once they were in the buns.  Pretty simple.

Dessert was much more interesting.  Halva is a middle-eastern sweet that is made from the balkans to northern India.  It's a confection of sorts, and ranges from a candylike consistency (think butterfingers) in the near east when it's made with sesame or sunflower nut butters, to a more semolina-based formula with fudge-like consistency as you head towards India.  We tried a northern Indian recipe for Suji Halwa.  Suji is apparently what they call semolina.

Now, we had a lot of trouble finding granular semolina.  We found lots of semolina flour, but the recipe called for the larger grains.  We had some questions about what the differences were between semolina, farina, and just plain flour.  Apparently we're grain-impaired.  From what we gathered, farina is to wheat what grits is to corn.  Semolina is either steel-cut common wheat for porridge or coarse ground durum (hard) wheat for pastas.  And as I mentioned at the top of the paragraph, for some reason you can find semolina flour in grocery stores, which appears to be finely ground durum wheat.  Since we wanted the larger grains, we went with a Cream of Wheat, which seems to be steel-cut common wheat.

So anyways.  The recipe calls for saffron and cardamom.  We had the ground cardamom, but we had to shell out big bucks for the saffron.  Four pinches (each in its own ampule) sold for $18 at the grocery store.  Ouch.  But as always, there's something special about a dish with saffron in it.  It's a subtle flavor, and I'm glad we took the effort to do it right.

Suji Halwa

adapted from http://showmethecurry.com/desserts/suji-halwa-aka-sheerakesari-ultimate-indian-dessert.html
1/2 cup Cream of Wheat/Suji
1 tablespoon Broken Cashews

1 tablespoon Raisins
1 tablespoon Sliced Almonds
1/2 cup Sugar
1.25 cup Water
Saffron – pinch
1/4 teaspoon Cardamom Powder

Heat a pan on medium heat and pour in the Ghee.  Allow the Ghee to heat up and then add in the Cashews, Raisins and the Almonds.  Fry them for about 30 seconds till the Raisins plum up.  Add in the Suji and cook until it releases an aroma and has a wonderful light-golden color.

Meanwhile crush the saffron with a little bit of sugar in a mortar and pestel.  Continously stir the Suji till done.  Add Sugar and mix in well.  Heat up the water in the microwave to speed up process and add to the Suji.  Lower the heat, add in the Saffron and keep stirring till it reaches the desired consistency.  Lastly, add in the Cardamom Powder, mix well, cover and allow it to stand for a couple of minutes.

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In the end, our meal was mostly about granular things.  Ground meat in a bun (which came from ground wheat), topped with granular, blended chickpeas, and a grainy, firm, sweet mush.  I realize that we were missing out on the greens, but oh well.  It was still a tasty meal.