Afghani Lamb

I'm at a black-tie Valentine's Day party. I get to talking with a family of hoteliers who mention, "a woman from Afghanistan" who "lives down the road" and "is always cooking." I get a phone number from them, but the phone number doesn't work. I knock on some doors down the road. Finally, the woman in the picture is the one who opens the door. "I know this is unusual," I begin, and basically ask for a cooking lesson. She invites me in. Everyone, meet the wondrous and kind, Shamayel Kargar, who welcomed a stranger in for tea and gave her a much needed lesson on what's good about Afghanistan. Click at right for the story, the recipe, and how-to-photos.

the beautiful photo: Stacey Cramp

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Afghani Lamb

Kourmet (like Gourmet with a K)

As Shamayel Kargar from Haret, Afghanistan, taught Lindsay Sterling in Falmouth, Maine, July 2011

Serves 6-8

Cooking time: 30min-1 hr

Active time: 20 minutes

4 yellow onions sliced into crescent moons

3 pounds deboned lamb shoulder or leg, cut into 3" chunks

1/4 cup vegetable oil

1/4 tsp turmeric

1 tsp Doordooah spice*

1/2 cup water

2 tsp salt

6 oz. (one small can) tomato paste

2 tomatoes

*Doordooah (pronounced Door Do Ah) Spice

1 tsp black cardamom

1 tsp tumeric

1 tsp cloves

1 tsp cinnamon

Blend all Doordooah spices in a spice blender (a.k.a. coffee grinder). This makes more than you'll need for the kourmet (that's the name of the dish you're cooking). Store in spice jar in spice cabinet for making kourmet again. Also try putting a tsp in when making chicken broth, and use that chicken broth as your liquid for cooking rice. Chicken soup with doordooah is supposed to be extra healing.

Back to the kourmet - cut onions into crescent moons and put in soup pot. (If you have a pressure cooker, see below for instructions). Wash lamb with cold water and put in pot. Wash cutting board, hands, and knife and anything else that touched raw meat with soapy water. Add oil, tumeric, Doordooah spice, salt, and one half cup water. Cover and cook on medium high until onions have disintegrated into a thick stew and the lamb is tender. This will take about an hour for lamb leg, longer for shoulder meat. Shave tomato into thin wedges (she did this in her hands with a paring knife over a bowl) and add tomato pieces to pot. Stir in tomato paste, cover and cook another 5 minutes more. She said you can also add cooked chickpeas and potato chunks here if you like, but we both liked the dish just meat and sauce. Serve w/out silverware using bread to scoop up bites. Flatbreads like Tandor, Nan and Iraqi bread would be closest to what's served in Afghanistan.

If you have a pressure cooker this is a great dish for it. It takes a quarter of the cooking time to cook. Use the same recipe as above only you don't need any extra water and decrease the cooking time of the lamb and onions to about 20 minutes. Cook on high. Lock pressure cooker lid. Be sure to let the steam out of pressure cooker through valve before opening the lid.

Where to get....

Lamb. Try to find local lamb - it's much better. We were delighted to use North Star lamb. I visited the farm on open farm day and saw beautiful pasture lands, happy sheep, and two very conscientious, experienced owners. www.nsfarms.com. Whole Foods Portland (and perhaps all over New England) sells North Star lamb in the fresh meat case. The Market at Pineland Farms (15 Farmview Dr., New Gloucester, Maine) sells it frozen.

Black Cardamom: Black cardamon and green cardamon are different. Black pods are much larger (larger than a nutmeg nut) and have an outright campfire smokey flavor to them, while green pods are smaller (a little bigger than a sunflower seed) warmer, with no smokey component at all. And the black ones are black and the green ones are green. Both have a very strong menthol smell. I have not ever seen black cardamon in what I'd call a "normal" supermarket. I'm sure you can get it online. Around here, I bet I'll find it at Masala Mahal (Southside Plaza, 798 Main Street Route 1, South Portland, Maine), Al Sindbad (710 Forest Ave. Suite #3, Portland, Maine), and/or Ahram Halal Grocery (630 Forest Ave, Portland, Maine).

Pressure Cooker: She got hers at Macy's for $99. If you make a lot of stews and meats and soups, it'll take off 3/4 of your cooking times and save the electricity or gas it takes run your stovetop. "It's green energy!" Shamayel says. We also joked about the pressure cooker keeping the lamb steam in - as opposed to dripping down your kitchen walls. Seriously, nice perk!

copyright Lindsay Sterling 2011

See How To Do It

Afghani Lamb

This is the final dish, delicious!

Here we are in the beginning. She pulled some jar out of the spice cabinet and shook about a teaspoon into the pot of lamb chunks and onions. I was like, hold it right there, lady! What is that? It's an every day thing for her, but for us it's the secret spice mixture that makes this dish magical.

She calls it something that sounds like Door-doo-ah. And it contains equal parts ground turmeric (pictured below)...

...clove, cinnamon, and this beauty: black cardamon (see below). Smell it if you want to feel good. Seriously. It opens you up.

She likes using a pressure cooker because it keeps the steam in and quarters your cooking time. I did this dish at home with a covered soup pot and it's great, but I want a pressure cooker now.

This (below) is what the dish will look like when you're ready to add the fresh tomatoes and tomato paste.

Look at what the tomatoes did for the color of the dish... incredibly tantalizing.

What a dish, what a day.

photos: Stacey Cramp

copyright Lindsay Sterling 2011

The Story

Some Good Lamb

By Lindsay Sterling

Twenty-one years ago Shamayel Kargar and her husband had a hankering for some good lamb. What they had found at Shop ‘n Save was very different than what they were used to. Where they were from in Afghanistan, lamb came straight from the farm, and I mean straight. Since “sheep farm” wasn’t a category in the Greater Portland phone book, Shamayel asked her sister to watch the kids while she and her husband got in their car and headed away from town on Forest Ave. They figured they’d come to a pasture with some sheep on it eventually.

In Windham things were looking promising. They started seeing farm signs and open fields with cows. They drove down a couple driveways, asking any farmers they saw, “Hey, do you have any lamb?” Eventually, they came down the driveway of Lisa and Phil Webster. Yes! They do have lamb! Their families had been in the lamb business collectively for 200 years, and the couple had recently started their own venture: North Star Sheep Farm. Shamayel has been buying North Star lamb for the twenty years since.

When I see lamb at Trader Joe’s today, it’s usually from New Zealand. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t New Zealand the farthest possible distance in all the world a little lamb could travel to your table? My husband recently went there on a business trip and the jet lag was something else. What’s even crazier is this little loophole in reality: if you -- or a leg of lamb, say -- travelled from New Zealand to Maine against the spin of the earth at the speed of light, technically the lamb leg would travel back in time. Hey, maybe we’re on to something here… Maybe one day, lamb meat leaving New Zealand would actually become a whole, live animal upon landing! But why even consider jet-lagged, time-warped lamb when we have North Star Sheep Farm’s 65 acres of gorgeous pastureland with little fuzzy sheep on it munching on Maine grasses less than an hour from Portland? And you can get North Star lamb any time at the Whole Foods fresh meat case. You can in Portland, Maine, anyway. Those elsewhere can ask around for local lamb, or go out looking yourself for a sheep pasture!

I’m thrilled that fresh lamb is now available and convenient because the dish Shamayel taught me to make is about to overtake beef stew in my family favorites book. She calls the dish “kourmet.” That’s like “gourmet” but with a K. And it’s the easiest dish I’ve learned so far inside immigrant kitchens. In a covered soup pot or pressure cooker, you cook a lot of yellow onions and chunks of boneless lamb meat with a little oil, and a spice mixture of ground turmeric, clove, cinnamon, and black cardamom. Add to that in the final ten minutes, fresh tomato slices and a dollop of tomato paste. Over time, the structure of the onions disintegrates, and the moisture from the onions and lamb and tomatoes stays in the pot, making an incredibly satisfying thick sauce studded with chunks of tender meat. You eat it all up with your hands using flatbread. The Iraqi bread sold at markets and stores around town is close to what they’d serve in Afghanistan.

Shamayel reminded me as we cooked that Afghanistan is not just desert, war and destruction. “I love where I grew up: the cultures…the people, their hospitalities.” She showed me the Afghani tradition of neighbors cooking together, eating, talking and having tea. This, as much as the delicious recipe, I hope to pass on.

copyright Lindsay Sterling 2011