Dinner Diary - Curried Lamb Necks and Pumpkin

I was feeding the mother in law on Saturday, and wanted something spicy but not TOO spicy. Thankfully I had a couple of lamb necks in, waiting to be used. Normally you get them already portioned into chops, but if you can get them whole from the butcher do so. You won't get any little shards of bone in the finished meal, and you get so much flavour out of them cooked whole.

So, I took plenty of spices (cardamon, pepper, cinnamon, cumin, coriander, turmeric, a little chilli) toasted them and ground them up. I put an onion, lemon juice, salt, pepper, oil, ginger and garlic into the food processor and added the ground spices, and rubbed them in to the lamb. I put a tea-towel over the bowl and went mushroom picking...

When we got back hours later, I scraped them clean (keeping all the goo) and browned them off before putting them into the pressure cooker with the goo I'd rubbed off, stock, a tin of tomatoes and fresh coriander. You can boil it in a normal pan but the pressure cooker makes short work of even the toughest cuts - I gave this 25 minutes at full pressure.

While that was cooking I softened off more of the same spices with the addition of some fennel seeds, and fresh ginger, sliced onion, and chilli and put in loads of peeled, chopped pumpkin and fresh coriander. Yes, the kind you get for Halloween, its delicious. When it was good and smelly, I covered it with water and dried coconut powder, added lime juice and salt, and cooked it until it was soft.

Thats a really easy way to cook punmpkin, and quite lovely. At the end I added in some shredded cabbage, garam masala and let it steam through.

The lamb necks stripped clean of meat really easily, and went back in to their sauce with bell peppers just to reduce for a minute or two, and the whole shebang was served with rice. 

Is this a stand out dinner? Well no, I wouldn't have said so. This is a simple, tasty, easy, every day kind of dish. You can rub the marinade on the lamb after dinner one night and cook it the next, or even freeze it in the marinade. Well worth a go, its a cracking dish.