Lamb and pomegranate stew
When Seth asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year, I asked for something I've wanted for several years now: an enameled dutch oven. The gold standard for an enameled dutch oven is of course Le Creuset-which produces sturdy heirloom pieces at unapologetically heirloom prices. It happened that Amazon Prime Day shook free a nice wide casserole pot, so a Le Creuset dutch oven is mine. (I wasn't exactly picky about whether we got a tall dutch oven or a lower one, just so long I could conceivably stick a whole bird in there and put the lid on.)
I immediately went about thinking of things to make in this new cooking device and came across some Persian-inspired recipes recommended by the manufacturer, including a delightful lamb stew with dried apricots. Originally, I had planned to make the stew with candied apricots I made a few months ago. However, our CSA sent us a pomegranate that I thought would work just as well. A whole bunch of tweaks and adaptations later, I came up with a fragrant stew that had both a unique taste and neither of us could stop eating, so I believe this was a success. I more than likely will make this again since the morning after, our house still smelled so delightfully warm and comforting, it just was nice.
The original recipe uses both saffron and turmeric, which I think is overkill. Both have different flavour profiles, saffron being sweet and turmeric being astringent. If you're using it for colour, just one will do. I chose turmeric to balance out the flavours I put in and also counter the gaminess of lamb. Goat or beef could be good substitutes for the meat (with a preference for goat).
Lamb and pomegranate stew
2 lbs lamb meat (cubed)
2 tbsp flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp cumin
2 tsp honey
2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper (ground)
1/2 to 1 cup apple juice or apple sauce
1 leek (sliced thin)
4 cloves garlic
Seeds from 1 pomegranate (reserve 1/2 cup for garnish)
1/2 cup parsley or spring onions (chopped fine)
1/2 cup walnuts (coarsely chopped and toasted)
hot boiled water
1. Add 1 tbsp of oil to your stew pot. Sauté the leek and garlic over medium heat.
2. Toss lamb meat in flour. Add to pot and brown.
3. Add all the spices, lemon juice and honey. Coat the meat as best you can.
4. Pour in just enough hot water to cover the meat. Add apple juice.
5. Bring mixture to a boil then lower flame to simmer. Cover pot with lid and cook for 1.5 hours.
6. After 1.5 hours, check to see that meat is tender (it might still have a slight bite to it, which is fine). Add pomegranate seeds, reserving 1/2 cup for garnishing later. Simmer on low flame for additional 30 minutes.
7. Turn off heat. Garnish with parsley/spring onions, walnuts and pomegranate seeds. Serve hot.
A caveat on almonds and cooking substitutions
The original recipe called for adding slivered almonds at the end, which seems very Persian (and Ottoman). I like almonds as much as the next person, but almonds are a rather fraught topic where we live in California. I substituted with toasted walnuts in my recipe and try hard to substitute for almonds wherever I can. I need to state up front that all nut trees are water-intensive. But it's the sheer scale of growing almonds compared to other nuts that is problematic. California is the largest grower and exporter of almonds in the world. We are not talking about a slightly large percentile. California accounts for 80% of the world's almonds. Huge investor-driven orchards have sprung up in marginal lands that shouldn't rightly be farmed, taking advantage of a high-priced crop. In order to water these fields, underground water aquifers are being sucked dry by deeper wells faster than they can be recharged. California has an incredibly calcified water distribution rights system designed for its food basket region that isn't adapting fast enough to climate change pressures, including recent long droughts. What's lost are the things that cannot survive the threat of economies of scale, things like small, family-owned farms; greater crop diversity and bee-keeping. It requires armies of expensive honeybees each season to pollinate thousands of acres of American crops, including almonds. A diet of single-crop fields is actually harmful to bee nutrition, which compounded by the stresses of being moved cross-country with pollination seasons and the fact that bees have to be raised in industrial numbers, contributes to the massive honeybee (and native pollinator) die-offs to disease and mites we keep hearing about.
All these things taken together form the bones of a much larger human-made disaster. I'm not saying, by the way, we should all just give up almonds, anymore than giving up fish, beef or dairy will on its own save the planet. I think using less of the resources we take for granted a little more smartly will help though. From a practical "what's in your pantry right now" standpoint, most nuts are interchangeable texturally unless a specific flavour is needed. As a home cook, I actually find almond milk pretty underwhelming as an ingredient. The vaguely thick (slimy?) texture just doesn't cut it compared with dairy, and it doesn't lighten dark gravies as much as I would like. If you want to substitute dairy, I recommend soy milk. It comes in unsweetened form, which is what you would use in savoury dishes. On its own, unsweetened soy milk makes a great base for East Asian stews and hot pots. If you are allergic to soy, another decent substitute is rice milk. This one's a little thinner and less rich than soy milk, so keep that in mind when you're subbing. I haven't tried oat milk yet (though, really, oat milk?!), but I'm going to suspect it's closer to rice milk than not. Soy milk is a traditional food and rice milk could very well have been inspired by amazake, a sort of lightly porridgey, mildly fermented sake precursor. They're both lovely and worth appreciating on their own merits as drinks.
Update: It occurred to me that I might at least want to mention that soy and rice have environmental pitfalls of their own. Again, it's the scale of farming rather than the plants themselves that become problematic. Soy famously fixes nitrogen from the air into a form it can use in soil, but this is usually not enough for the plant alone. Farmers still have to add nitrogen fertilisers. Soybeans in the US are grown primarily as feed for livestock (domestically and exported abroad to feed e.g. Chinese pigs) and the US is the world's largest producer of soybeans by far. Industrial livestock production is its own black hole of resource-guzzling which I won't go into at length here. Rice's real issue is wet rice farming, which traditionally requires immense amounts of water and produces methane over time. Because it's a staple food for billions of people, way more important than almonds or soy would be, we're incentivised to grow as much of it as possible. None of these things are grown in a vacuum. Growers, governments and scientists aren't immune to the fact that maybe, hey, the way we're growing things now has too much harm involved. As someone who likes food, likes to talk about food and think up new ways to eat tasty food, thinking about my food's lifecycle enhances my appreciation of the input it takes. It's not about drastically changing a lifestyle by force. Pay a little more attention to where your food comes from, change what you can, don't buy food that's clearly banking too hard on its credentialed packaging-buy stuff as close to its original form as is reasonable. You're not going to bake all your own bread if your schedule is 9 to 5, don't hate yourself for it. We're balancing life, not fadding it.
I immediately went about thinking of things to make in this new cooking device and came across some Persian-inspired recipes recommended by the manufacturer, including a delightful lamb stew with dried apricots. Originally, I had planned to make the stew with candied apricots I made a few months ago. However, our CSA sent us a pomegranate that I thought would work just as well. A whole bunch of tweaks and adaptations later, I came up with a fragrant stew that had both a unique taste and neither of us could stop eating, so I believe this was a success. I more than likely will make this again since the morning after, our house still smelled so delightfully warm and comforting, it just was nice.
The original recipe uses both saffron and turmeric, which I think is overkill. Both have different flavour profiles, saffron being sweet and turmeric being astringent. If you're using it for colour, just one will do. I chose turmeric to balance out the flavours I put in and also counter the gaminess of lamb. Goat or beef could be good substitutes for the meat (with a preference for goat).
Lamb and pomegranate stew
2 lbs lamb meat (cubed)
2 tbsp flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp cumin
2 tsp honey
2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper (ground)
1/2 to 1 cup apple juice or apple sauce
1 leek (sliced thin)
4 cloves garlic
Seeds from 1 pomegranate (reserve 1/2 cup for garnish)
1/2 cup parsley or spring onions (chopped fine)
1/2 cup walnuts (coarsely chopped and toasted)
hot boiled water
1. Add 1 tbsp of oil to your stew pot. Sauté the leek and garlic over medium heat.
2. Toss lamb meat in flour. Add to pot and brown.
3. Add all the spices, lemon juice and honey. Coat the meat as best you can.
4. Pour in just enough hot water to cover the meat. Add apple juice.
5. Bring mixture to a boil then lower flame to simmer. Cover pot with lid and cook for 1.5 hours.
6. After 1.5 hours, check to see that meat is tender (it might still have a slight bite to it, which is fine). Add pomegranate seeds, reserving 1/2 cup for garnishing later. Simmer on low flame for additional 30 minutes.
7. Turn off heat. Garnish with parsley/spring onions, walnuts and pomegranate seeds. Serve hot.
A caveat on almonds and cooking substitutions
The original recipe called for adding slivered almonds at the end, which seems very Persian (and Ottoman). I like almonds as much as the next person, but almonds are a rather fraught topic where we live in California. I substituted with toasted walnuts in my recipe and try hard to substitute for almonds wherever I can. I need to state up front that all nut trees are water-intensive. But it's the sheer scale of growing almonds compared to other nuts that is problematic. California is the largest grower and exporter of almonds in the world. We are not talking about a slightly large percentile. California accounts for 80% of the world's almonds. Huge investor-driven orchards have sprung up in marginal lands that shouldn't rightly be farmed, taking advantage of a high-priced crop. In order to water these fields, underground water aquifers are being sucked dry by deeper wells faster than they can be recharged. California has an incredibly calcified water distribution rights system designed for its food basket region that isn't adapting fast enough to climate change pressures, including recent long droughts. What's lost are the things that cannot survive the threat of economies of scale, things like small, family-owned farms; greater crop diversity and bee-keeping. It requires armies of expensive honeybees each season to pollinate thousands of acres of American crops, including almonds. A diet of single-crop fields is actually harmful to bee nutrition, which compounded by the stresses of being moved cross-country with pollination seasons and the fact that bees have to be raised in industrial numbers, contributes to the massive honeybee (and native pollinator) die-offs to disease and mites we keep hearing about.
All these things taken together form the bones of a much larger human-made disaster. I'm not saying, by the way, we should all just give up almonds, anymore than giving up fish, beef or dairy will on its own save the planet. I think using less of the resources we take for granted a little more smartly will help though. From a practical "what's in your pantry right now" standpoint, most nuts are interchangeable texturally unless a specific flavour is needed. As a home cook, I actually find almond milk pretty underwhelming as an ingredient. The vaguely thick (slimy?) texture just doesn't cut it compared with dairy, and it doesn't lighten dark gravies as much as I would like. If you want to substitute dairy, I recommend soy milk. It comes in unsweetened form, which is what you would use in savoury dishes. On its own, unsweetened soy milk makes a great base for East Asian stews and hot pots. If you are allergic to soy, another decent substitute is rice milk. This one's a little thinner and less rich than soy milk, so keep that in mind when you're subbing. I haven't tried oat milk yet (though, really, oat milk?!), but I'm going to suspect it's closer to rice milk than not. Soy milk is a traditional food and rice milk could very well have been inspired by amazake, a sort of lightly porridgey, mildly fermented sake precursor. They're both lovely and worth appreciating on their own merits as drinks.
Update: It occurred to me that I might at least want to mention that soy and rice have environmental pitfalls of their own. Again, it's the scale of farming rather than the plants themselves that become problematic. Soy famously fixes nitrogen from the air into a form it can use in soil, but this is usually not enough for the plant alone. Farmers still have to add nitrogen fertilisers. Soybeans in the US are grown primarily as feed for livestock (domestically and exported abroad to feed e.g. Chinese pigs) and the US is the world's largest producer of soybeans by far. Industrial livestock production is its own black hole of resource-guzzling which I won't go into at length here. Rice's real issue is wet rice farming, which traditionally requires immense amounts of water and produces methane over time. Because it's a staple food for billions of people, way more important than almonds or soy would be, we're incentivised to grow as much of it as possible. None of these things are grown in a vacuum. Growers, governments and scientists aren't immune to the fact that maybe, hey, the way we're growing things now has too much harm involved. As someone who likes food, likes to talk about food and think up new ways to eat tasty food, thinking about my food's lifecycle enhances my appreciation of the input it takes. It's not about drastically changing a lifestyle by force. Pay a little more attention to where your food comes from, change what you can, don't buy food that's clearly banking too hard on its credentialed packaging-buy stuff as close to its original form as is reasonable. You're not going to bake all your own bread if your schedule is 9 to 5, don't hate yourself for it. We're balancing life, not fadding it.