Cooking: Lamb Stoba

I haven't posted much craft lately because I'm currently working on a 4 ply shrug. It's taking a while because a) I didn't have enough 4ply and b) I keep finding other tasks I need to do... and that's how I've come to another cooking post.

I've just bought a whole lost of Women's Weekly cookbooks. I haven't yet received them in the mail, but knowing they're on their way has made me feel guilty because I have a few others that I haven't yet used - Women's Weekly cookbooks and a few Jamie Oliver ones (all at reduced prices at Dirt Cheap Books or Catch of the Day). So the perfect opportunity came to flick through them when I decided I wanted to eat something different for a change, and I was actually going to be home to make dinner.

My three favourite things to cook are sweet foods, curries and toad in the hole. So it was easy to choose to look through my new New Curries cookbook by Women's Weekly for some inspiration. My criteria to choose a curry was simple: one where we had the ingredients at home to use up. So when I read the Lamb Stoba recipe I had hit the jackpot: we always have some lamb in the freezer, cumin, allspice, ginger, cinnamon stick, brown sugar and tinned tomatoes are always in the pantry. There's always capsicum in the fridge to stiryfry. We have chilli plants and lime trees in the backyard.

Lamb (and Veal) Stoba

 
I started to collect the ingredients... There wasn't enough lamb... That's ok; top it up with some veal... There wasn't any ginger... Oh darn!

I had another recipe I was going to make the following day. As we had those ingredients, I made it instead. So the next day ginger appeared in the shopping and the curry was back on the agenda! I made it without a hitch. It was delicious; although maybe too much sugar and not enough chillies. What I enjoyed about it most was that it's a different flavour to the curries I usually have, which at my house is SPICY, being sweet with a hint of spice. I actually like enjoying my curry without dousing the flames as I eat.

The Women's Weekly New Curries cookbook is really good. There's a variety of curries from around the world. At first I was disappointed that some recipes included curry pastes that you buy (because it's expensive and defeats the point of buying a recipe book), but I found at the back of the book there's receipes to make the mixed spices and some of the curry pastes.