Recipes

BBQ Lamb Skewers

- Alex Prichard 5 Comments

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Here in Adelaide we’re having something of a ‘hot’ week … today we hit 44.2°C and I spent the morning at a local pool wearing out my small child. It appears to have worked, as he then slept for over a couple of hours, which is the most sensible activity for pretty much anyone at the moment!

It’s actually too hot to contemplate barbecuing (we tried last night and Andy melted into a little puddle …) but by the time Saturday rolls around, this weather will be a distant memory and summer will be back on an even keel with temperatures in the high twenties/low thirties and that is perfect BBQ weather.

I have had this recipe tagged for ages – but wasn’t able to make it because we’ve had something of a time tracking down szechuan pepper. Andy sourced me some for Christmas so you can now expect to see szechuan pepper in almost everything.

The original recipe calls these Xinjiang skewers. On reading the recipe, I thought it sounded remarkably Uyghur like (yes, my whole one Uyghur restaurant experience qualified me to have that thought!) and it turns out that Xinjiang (or, more formally, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) is the province in China in which most Uyghur live.

There you go – recipes and a bit of geography/politics to boot!

Tone down (or dial up) the chilli or szechuan pepper to suit. We found that the quantities given worked well (and weren’t so spicy that our toddler couldn’t make a fair first of things either). And, of course, you can always substitute chicken (or other BBQ friendly meat) for the lamb.

The marinade has the bonus of being extremely quick and easy to make and versatile. It is also great to make ahead to take to BBQs – beats supermarket snags with almost no effort!

We’ve given this recipe a couple of outings already. The first time we made it, we had no skewers (long story) so there was no point in photographing it. It would have been ‘lamb on a plate’. For that – see my interpretation (via Elizabeth David) of the Greek arni souvlaki.

Don’t want to print? Download the lamb skewers recipe as a pdf!

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BBQ Lamb Skewers

Ingredients

  • 1 kg lamb shoulder, cut into large bite sized chunks
  • 2 tbsp ground cumin
  • 1 tbsp chilli flakes
  • 1 tbsp ground black pepper (as freshly ground as possible)
  • 1 tsp ground szechuan pepper
  • 2 tsp ground ginger
  • 4 tbsp peanut oil (or other neutral flavoured oil)
  • 4 tbsp soy sauce
  • 4 cloves garlic, finely crushed
  • salt to taste

Instructions

  1. Combine all the ingredients (bar the lamb) to make a marinade, and then mix the lamb through with your hands, ensuring that it's evenly coated with the marinade.
  2. Cover with cling film and leave to marinate for as long as possible - preferably overnight but if you're in a real hurry, half an hour will do.
  3. Heat a grill or BBQ and thread the cubes of lamb onto skewers. If using bamboo skewers, be sure to soak them for at least an hour before using so that they don't splinter and don't catch on fire!
  4. Cook the skewers, turning frequently, until the lamb is done to your liking.
  5. Serve with plenty of salad.
https://eatingadelaide.com/bbq-lamb-skewers/

Nepalese Lamb Chops

- Alex Prichard 2 Comments

Nepalese Lamb Chops

Regular readers will know that last year, in particular, I ate more Nepalese than average. That means I went to two Nepalese restaurants. But seriously, how many have you been to?!

Despite really enjoying the food on both occasions, this isn’t a cuisine I’ve ventured into in the kitchen. So when I spotted a recipe for lamb chhoeyla (Nepalese grilled lamb) in Mums Still Know Best by the Hairy Bikers I thought I’d give it a go.  I actually made this late last year and I’m quite glad it’s taken me so long to blog it because if you’re in a part of Australia where it’s sweltering (it’s almost cracked 41°C today here in Adelaide) then you might be after something different to do on the BBQ …

I took a few short cuts with this but it was absolutely fantastic. You could leave out either the sauce or the marinade. For example, if you were doing a BBQ and catering for a variety of tastes, omit the marinade and serve the sauce on the side. Cooking for people who like spicy food but you’re running short on time? Ditch the sauce. Or just make the sauce and serve it on the side of, well, um, anything really. We had a little left over and used it in a stir fry the next day.

Talk about versatile!

This is all easy-peasy but you do need to allow a little time for marinading and making the sauce. And, of course, this is spicy so not ideal for any chilli-averse guests!

Don’t want to print? Download a pdf of the recipe.

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Nepalese Lamb Chops (Lamb Chhoeyla)

Ingredients

  • 4-5 lamb chops
    • Marinade
  • 1 tbsp ground cumin
  • 1 tsp turmeric
  • ¼ tsp grated nutmeg
  • 2 tbsp lemon juice
  • 1 tbsp chilli paste (I used a Szechuan chutney)
  • 4 cloves garlic, crushed
  • 1 tbsp ginger paste
  • pinch asafoetida
  • 2 tbsp vegetable oil
    • Chhoeyla Sauce
  • 1 tbsp cumin seeds, toasted
  • 1 red chilli, roughly chopped
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 2.5 cm piece of ginger
  • pinch asafoetida
  • ½ tsp turmeric
  • 1 tbsp vegetable oil - use some mustard oil for an extra spice hit

Instructions

    Marinade
  1. To make the marinade, mix all the ingredients together in a bowl. Add the lamb chops and ensure they are well coated. Cover the bowl with cling film and set aside for at least a couple of hours.
    2. Sauce
  2. Place all ingredients in a blender and process until you have a smooth paste. Season with salt and pepper and adjust thickness (depending on how you want to use it!) with oil.
  3. Cook the lamb - either on the BBQ or using a griddle. Baste with any left over marinade.
  4. When the lamb is cooked to your liking, you can either chop it up (especially if boneless) and mix it through the sauce or you can serve it with the sauce on the side.
https://eatingadelaide.com/nepalese-lamb-chops/

Potato Bread and How to Four Plait

- Alex Prichard 1 Comment

Untitled finished product

At present, we are feeling rather swamped in our crop of home grown Dutch Cream potatoes. So far it is not even a particularly prolific crop (there are still four plants in the ground about which I’m feeling very nervous) but it has produced more potatoes than we can reasonably eat and we are not in possession of a root cellar. If we were, it would be a wine cellar.

Fortunately, I’ve made potato bread before and I thought it would be an opportunity to kill a couple of birds with one stone. The toddler refuses to eat both potatoes and bread (the exceptions being chips in a pub and one type of milk roll that my mum makes). I originally thought that growing and digging up potatoes might enthuse him but it turns out that it has only enthused him in shouting about the “tatoes in the garden” and ferreting about in the soil.

Making the bread dough (using a recipe from The Big Book of Bread) with him was surprisingly difficult. He was excellent at ricing the potatoes but four hands in a mixing bowl (yep, we did this all by hand … the KitchenAid got a break!) made for a lot of flour on the bench and made it very difficult for me to judge how much water we needed to add. And a toddler can shove a surprising amount of part made bread dough in his mouth when you’re not looking. Apparently raw flour, raw dough and everything in between are ripe for ‘tasting’.

It’s surprising then that doing the four plait with his help was actually really easy. While Peppa Pig is inculcating my child with all manner of feminist socialist politics, she’s also taught him all about creating ‘wiggly worms’ so I was able to give him chunks of dough and let him loose.

So – the four plait. We were originally going to make rolls, as I figured that small hands might be able to work with simple knots. However, I decided that I also need to stretch myself just a bit. I enjoyed watching almost all of Masterchef Professionals (UK), including the bread skills test where Monica Galetti set four chefs the task of, amongst others, doing a four plait.

I’ve never done this before but having had long hair almost my entire life I am totally adept at a three plait (in hair, but not shabby when it comes to bread either). So when I say that I found this easy to do – you’ve got your caveat.

Untitled before

I had a look around the internet for written (rather than video) instructions because the thing with plaiting is that you need to know which strand to put where. The instructions at Alchemy in the Kitchen were exactly what I needed.

With plaiting you number the positions of the strands (left to right or right to left doesn’t matter) and then you follow a sequence. You’ll find variations on this but I followed the above which is:

4 over 2
1 over 3
2 over 3

rinse and repeat

You need to make your strands of dough tapered at the ends so that you can tuck them under and make a tidy loaf (note – not what I did!). And you need to keep your plaiting tight so you do need to do a bit of fiddling as you work. The “2 over 3” step is particularly counter intuitive. What this is doing is creating a spine for the rest of the plait to sit on. Keep this in mind and work tight and you’ll be fine!  Though perhaps not up to doing this in front of Monica Galetti …

However, your toddler might still refuse to eat bread and you’ll scoff the lot with plenty of butter in the space of a couple of days …

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Potato Bread

Ingredients

  • ~ 350g potato, peeled, cubed, boiled, riced/mashed and cooled
  • 500g flour
  • 2 tsp (7g) dried yeast
  • 2 tsp salt (don't skimp)
  • 35g finely grated parmesan cheese (this doesn't need to be too precise, use more if using a not so strongly flavoured cheese)
  • 1 1/2 tsp fennel seeds (or other herb/seed of your choice - carraway would work well too)
  • freshly ground black pepper
  • ~ 200mL warm water

Instructions

  1. Mix the flour and potato together in a large bowl. Use your hands and incorporate so that the mix is crumbly.
  2. Add the yeast, salt, cheese, seeds and pepper and mix well.
  3. Slowly add the warm water. You may need more or less than the 200mL depending on your flour, so add about half and incorporate well before adding a little more as you need it. You need to bring all the ingredients together in a soft dough.
  4. Tip the dough out onto a lightly floured bench and give it a good keading, until the dough is soft and silky. Lightly grease the dough and return to its bowl. Cover the bowl and leave to rise until roughly doubled in size.
  5. Lightly knead again and, if doing a four plait, divide the dough into four equal portions and form these into ropes that are slightly tapered at both ends.
  6. Plait using the 4 over 2, 1 over 3, 2 over 3 approach. Do the plait on a slightly floured baking tray (or use a siplain (silicone) mat, which you can move onto a baking tray easily later).
  7. If not plaiting, shape into whatever shape you want. Or even make rolls.
  8. Cover and leave to roughly double again.
  9. Preheat oven to 180C fan (200C conventional) and cook for approximately half an hour. Bread should be risen, tanned in colour and should sound hollow when tapped on the base. If making rolls, you'll probably need about 15-20 minutes in the oven.
  10. Leave to cool on a wire rack and gobble down with lashings of butter!
https://eatingadelaide.com/potato-bread-four-plait/