A Simplified Lamb Curry

Name: A Simplified Lamb Curry
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon vegetable oil; 1 small onion or fat shallot, chopped; 1/4 large bell pepper, red or green, diced; 1 garlic clove, peeled and chopped; 6–8 approximately 3/4-inch chunks leftover roast lamb cut close to the bone, where meat is rarest; 1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds; 1 1/2–2 tablespoons good Madras curry powder; Salt; Fresh lemon juice to taste; 3/4–1 cup braising liquid (any leftover pan juice, or chicken, lamb, or veal broth); 1 tablespoon shredded unsweetened coconut (optional); 1/2 small tart apple, peeled, seeded, and cut in slim wedges (optional)

December 9, 2011

For a dinner party, I often serve a roast leg of lamb, studded with garlic cloves and slathered in mustard French-style. I make sure the meat when cooked is always rosy—in fact, saignant at the bone—and therefore good to use in any number of dishes that ordinarily call for raw lamb. And I always ﬁnd myself with plenty of leftovers—one forgets how hefty a leg of lamb is these days. I wrote about some of my experiments with leftover lamb in my book The Tenth Muse in a section called “The Nine Lives of a Leg of Lamb.” So, if you are confronted with this happy dilemma of too much lamb, you’ll ﬁnd nine recipes there, which can be cut down to serve one. I don’t want to repeat them here, but I have since experimented with this lamb curry for one, which I ﬁnd delicious.

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