Cooking: Lamb Pilaf

Xinjiang’s been all over the place lately, and now I’m craving pilaf too. I still remember the Dingding stir-fried noodles—wait, no, the lamb pilaf and baked samsa I had in Beijing way back. Can’t get any of that now, so I have to make it myself.

Ingredients:

• Lamb
• Carrot
• Onion
• Raisins
• Rice
• Cumin
• Soy sauce
• Salt

For lamb pilaf, first you need lamb… usually leg of lamb, the fatty-and-lean kind.

Then shred the carrot, shred the onion, get the raisins ready, and soak the rice.

• First, heat the pot, add a little oil, then add the lamb and start stir-frying to render the fat out of the fatty pieces.
• Add the shredded carrot and onion, then cumin, soy sauce, and salt. Keep stir-frying. Better to make it on the salty side, since there’s rice too.
• Add the washed rice, add water until it covers the lamb, and simmer on low heat for 5 minutes.
• After 5 minutes, dump everything in the pot into a rice cooker, add the raisins, stir it all together, and hit the cook-rice setting.
• Once it’s done, you’re good.

Honestly the final result was a bit awkward, because I started out on high heat and it felt like it was basically done already… in the end I could only add more water and keep cooking, and it came out kind of mushy.

Next time I should learn my lesson: use low heat, and add more salt and soy sauce so the flavor’s richer. Not a success this time, but not exactly a failure either—it tasted OK.