A Delectable Roast Meat Curry

It turns out that when you’re used to making a roast leg of lamb for Christmas dinner and you’re generally serving 6-10 people, but this year you only have two adults and two kids who don’t actually eat masses of lamb on the regular, then you might end up in our situation. Three days after Christmas, we still had a solid three pounds of roast lamb in the fridge, and I had actually had my fill of sliced roast lamb with mint sauce and stuffing, roast lamb sandwiches, etc.

Luckily, it is easy to transform leftover roast meat into a delectable Sri Lankan curry. I don’t have a precise recipe for you here, but basic procedure:

– chop three onions
– chop plenty of garlic (I think I did half a head)
– cube the meat (fairly big cubes are fine)
– sauté onions and garlic in oil with 1 t. each mustard seed and cumin seed, cinnamon stick, 3-5 cardamom pods, 3-5 cloves; if you have curry leaves on hand, toss those in too
– add 1-2 T cayenne (to your taste)
– add 1 heaping t. Sri Lankan curry powder
– add 1 – 1.5 t. salt
– add 1 t. tamarind paste (the liquidy paste in the Tamicon jar — if you’re using a different kind, you may need a different amount)
– add a few T ketchup or 1/2 can tomato puree

– add 1 can coconut milk (I like Chaokoh)

You should now have a delicious sauce. The meat is already cooked (hopefully on the rarer side for best results), so just add it now, bring it to a boil, then turn the heat down to a simmer and simmer it for 10-20 minutes, covered, just to let the flavors blend.

Have finished lamb curry with bread or rice. If there’s STILL more than you need, it will freeze beautifully this way, to pull out a month or two from now when the thought of roast lamb is a distant, fragrant memory.

Alternatively, you can now take your lamb curry, and use it to make either a lamb biryani or lamb kottu roti, which would make for a pretty fabulous New Year’s feast dish, letting you take that 3 lbs. of lamb and make enough food to feed a dozen people. We don’t have a dozen people around our place at the moment, but next year…

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