Another week, another meal thwarted by one of our offspring…
It was Baby Mash this time. We normally make this international dishes on the weekend, when there are two of us around, and had planned for this to be the case for Djibouti’s national dish, skoudehkaris. Unfortunately, Baby Mash chose this particular weekend to come down with a virus and raging fever that caused him (and Miranda) to spend a night in hospital. He’s fine now, thankfully, but we did have to postpone our dinner.
It did happen to be a long weekend, which would have given us an extra day to fit it in, but the thing is, we’d already bought a massive steak to cook on the BBQ in honour of the fact that Miranda is no longer pregnant and can therefore eat steak again – and there was no way we were forgoing that! So the skoudehkaris was postponed to a weekday, meaning that the challenge of cooking it whilst also keeping an infant happy fell to Miranda. Luckily, said infant was in a relatively amenable mood that day, despite having gone through the trauma of his first immunisations, and we managed it!
There are lots of different skoudehkaris recipes online, some of which incorporate rice and some of which don’t. We opted for the one on 196 Flavors, partly because it’s a website we trust and partly because it was one that did include rice, and we liked the idea of a one-pot meal.
Skoudehkaris
Ingredients
450g lamb shoulder, diced
2 1/2 cups basmati rice
5 tomatoes, peeled, deseeded and diced
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 red onion, sliced
2 onions, finely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1/2 tsp chilli powder (omitted in our version)
4 tbsp oil
1 tsp ground cumin
6 cardamom pods
2 pinches of cinnamon
Salt
A few coriander leaves, chopped
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 180C.
2. In a dutch oven/casserole dish, brown the meat over medium high heat. Set aside.
3. Add all the onions and sweat.
4. Add the garlic, tomatoes, chilli powder, tomato puree, salt and spices and stir.
5. Return the meat to the pan and cover everything with boiling water.
6. Cook, uncovered, in the oven for 45 minutes.
7. Remove the pot from the oven and put it on the stove over medium heat.
8. Add the rice, mix well, cover and cook for 15 minutes (5 minutes over medium heat and 10 minutes on low heat). Add water if necessary.
9. Sprinkle with the coriander leaves to serve.
Serves 4
Regular (and very observant) readers of this blog will know that one of Miranda’s least favourite cooking tasks, perhaps slightly irrationally, is peeling and deseeding tomatoes. We have to admit that she gladly used the ‘I had to do this quickly because I was looking after a baby’ excuse to get out of the peeling, although she did begrudgingly deseed them. And honestly, did a bit of tomato skin make any difference to the finished dish? She really doesn’t think so.
As for the finished dish, we commented that it was what we expected a lot of the African dishes to be like: simple and hearty with a bit of spice. The lamb wasn’t quite as tender as we’d have hoped, but nor was it tended to as attentively as we’d hoped, so maybe with a bit more browning and/or cooking time, it might have been a bit softer.
And now, let’s all chorus together: ‘Toddler Mash refused to touch it.’ (The broccoli was for his benefit. He will – usually – eat that.)
Good Food on Bad Plates 