I’ve already posted two different version of Sichuan string beans–both of them dry fried. There’s the more traditional one with pork and a vegetarian variation.

There’s a reason I’ve done two different versions of the recipe–it’s one of my favorite Chinese dishes ever.

I’m in good company–it was also Zak’s Grandma Doris’ favorite Chinese dish.

There’s just something about the chewy texture of the beans with lightly crispy, browned exterior and the sweet, concentrated bean flavor (concentrated because dry frying cooks out most of the water in the beans) that is ultimately satisfying. Add Sichuan peppercorns, chilies, and preserved Sichuan vegetable–and it’s a beautiful combination of flavors, textures and colors.

So why am I posting a third version of it?

Because I can introduce you to another cooking technique, tell you about a great Sichuan restaurant in Columbus AND because I can write about a really good recipe all in one post. That’s why, so there.

First, about that Sichuan Restaurant in Columbus (2869 Olentangy River Road, next to Buckeye Bar & Grill). Zak and I read about it on alt.eats.columbus and after their ringing endorsement, we had to go and try it out.

So we did.

And it was GOOD.

In fact, it’s pretty much the best Sichuan food I’ve had since we moved away from Maryland that I didn’t cook my own self. Now, I have to admit, I like my own Ma Po Tofu better, but their Dry Fried Beef and Lamb with Fresh Chili and Cumin rock my world.

The last time we were there, we tried their “Mala String Beans,” which is their own variation on Sichuan Dry Fried String Beans.

The restaurant, however, didn’t dry fry the beans–they oil blanched them just until the skins of the beans wrinkled and crisped and there were only a couple of browned spots on the beans. Dry frying produces a smokier, more browned result–these beans were slightly juicier because more water was left in them, brighter green and with a slightly crisper texture.

They also had been cooked with thinly sliced fresh garlic, dried chili peppers and thinly sliced fresh chilies, with copious amounts of who Sichuan peppercorns sprinkled throughout. There was a tiny drizzle of soy sauce in the dish, and perhaps the tiniest sprinkling of sugar, but I am not positive about that.

They were addictive. Not too salty, not too sweet, not wet, not dry. Ringing with spices.

As Baby Bear of Goldilocks fame would say, they were “just right.”

So, of course, I had to try and make them at home.

And, as per usual, I had to go and meddle with the recipe somewhat to make it my own. Besides, I had about a quarter pound of King Family Farm bacon unused in my fridge that would be a shame to let go to waste.

But before we start into the recipe, let’s talk a bit about oil blanching.

Oil blanching is a technique used in Chinese cooking, primarily Cantonese and Sichuan cooking, to impart a special texture and flavor to the food that is cooked in this manner. It is an expensive technique, so it tends to be used more in festival foods, restaurant cooking, and banquet cookery, but it can be done in the home. I personally wouldn’t do it often myself–it uses too much oil for my own sense of health and a happy food budget, but it’s perfectly fine to do it every now and then.

Basically, using a wok, which means you will ultimately use less oil, you heat up enough oil to just cover the food you are blanching–you can do it in two or three batches if need be–and you heat it until a chopstick or a bit of the food you are cooking put into it foams up and boils merrily away in the oil. I heat the oil on medium heat to keep it from smoking and starting to break down–it takes a wee bit longer that way, but you end up with a better tasting end result.

For this recipe, I used about 3/4 inch of oil in the bottom of my wok. It was just enough to cover my string beans and have them float without crowding themselves in the oil.

After it’s heated up, you add the food you are going to cook–and before you add it you make certain it’s perfectly dry on the outside unless you like sputtering oil spattered all over yourself and your kitchen–and stir it with a chopstick to break it all up and distribute it evenly.

Then you let it cook until it’s just cooked through, remove it from the oil and drain it on paper towels. When you are finished with the oil–you can filter it and use it again, but after oil blanching any vegetable, you are better off discarding it because it’s full of liquid that has cooked out of the oil, and with the water in the oil, it won’t really cook anything well again. It also takes on a funny odor after a while.

But that’s all there is to oil blanching, which you need to know about to replicate this recipe.

Oh, one more thing–if you leave out the bacon, the result will taste more like what we had at Fortune. If you keep the bacon in and you aren’t a vegetarian, I bet you’ll be happier.

Sichuan String Beans with Bacon
Ingredients:

1 pound string beans, topped, tailed, snapped into bite sized pieces and washed, then dried thoroughly
enough peanut or canola oil to fill your wok up to about 3/4″ to 1″ deep
1/4 pound bacon, cut into thin slices
2 large garlic cloves, peeled and cut into paper-thin slices
3 scallions, white and light green parts, cleaned and thinly sliced on the bias
5 fresh red and green jalapeno peppers, cut into julienne slices
1 teaspoon whole sichuan peppercorns, picked over to remove stems and twigs
2 teaspoons thin soy sauce
1/4 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
salt to taste

Method:

Put the oil into the wok and heat up on medium heat until a green bean dropped into the oil will immediately start bubbling and frothing away.

When it’s hot, add all the green beans at once, and using a bamboo chopstick, maneuver them around until they are distributed evenly in the oil without overlaying each other at all.

Cook, stirring with the chopstick now and again, until the color of the beans deepens and brightens, the skin wrinkles up and just begins to brown and crisp in a few spots on the edges. Fish the beans out with a skimmer, and drain on layers of paper towels.

Discard the oil, leaving a shiny, thin layer on the wok. Wipe the wok clean on the outside and put it on the heat again, and raise the flame to high.

Add the bacon to the wok and cook, stirring until it’s half done. Add the garlic, scallions, chilies and peppercorns at this time and cook, stirring until the bacon is done and the garlic and scallions are golden brown. Add the beans back in and cook, stirring, one more minute.

Turn off the heat, add the soy sauce and sesame oil, and sprinkle in salt to taste–probably about a pinch will do.

Serve immediately with steamed rice. It goes beautifully with Ma Po Tofu.

Indian food has an unfortunate reputation of being both time consuming and difficult.

This is not necessarily true.

Yes, there are curries out there that should properly be cooked down for hours and hours on low heat, curries which involve multiple spice pastes ground to just the correct texture and added at just the right times. The holiday, festival and banquet foods of India -are- indeed complex and involve a great deal of preparation and work to make properly.

But you know that everyone in India doesn’t eat or cook those dishes every day.

AND, I hope you also know that everything that is cooked and eaten in India isn’t a curry, with lots of sauce, right? You know that by now, surely.

What I’m getting at is that there are plenty of fairly simple, straightforward homestyle dishes cooked in India, and they are just as delicious and easy when cooked for our families here in the United States.

And this is one of those dishes.

These lamb patties are a riff off of several Madhur Jaffrey recipes and others I’ve used over the years. I’ve cooked those recipes often enough that I just sort of make up my own version off the top of my head, spicing the patties however I feel like on that particular day. These patties are simplicity itself to make–thy just require ground lamb, fresh garlic, ginger, scallions or shallots, fresh mint, spices and a wee bit of yogurt. They are mixed together and then pan fried in the tiniest amount of oil possible, because the rich lamb has enough fat to almost keep the patties from sticking to the pan.

Traditionally, when serving a non-sauced or dry dish in most Indian households, a wet salad, raita or chutney is served with it. For these patties, I chose to do a variation on my more traditional Green Chutney recipe. In this version, I used more cilantro, less mint and added Thai basil to the herbs. I used one large garlic clove, and plenty of fresh ginger, lime zest, lime juice and five red Thai chilies from my garden.

Let me tell you about these chilies.

They are beastly hot. I think it was because of our drought in June, but they are swelteringly, tongue-blisteringly hot this year. And I used five of them, because the seasonings in the lamb are so soft and gentle, that I really wanted the chutney to light a fire in the mouth. You can use as many or as few as you like, but use red ones, because the flecks of red look really pretty in the velvety green chutney.

For cooling the arson I committed with the chuntey, I also served the patties with a drizzle of my own homemade Greek yogurt. (Yes, you will eventually get a recipe for that–but I’m still tinkering about with it. Be patient!)

The texture of the patties is meltingly tender–especially if you are careful when you mix in the seasonings not to knead the meat too harshly. When you form the patties, be gentle and don’t compact the meat too tightly, just gently pat it into shape to get the proper tenderness. Also, make certain to let a crust form on the bottom of the patties before trying to flip them. That way they’ll have a lightly crisped outside and that soft melt-in-the-mouth inside, AND they won’t fall apart when you flip them.

This is an easy Indian main dish–I had it cooked and table ready in a mere 45 minutes, though I could have managed 30 minutes if I’d rushed at it.

Fast enough for a weekday dinner…and bursting with flavor, texture and color.

Lamb Patties With Incendiary Green Chutney
Ingredients:

1/2 teaspoon cumin seed
1/2 teaspoon coriander seed
1/4 teaspoon fennel seed
1/2 teaspoon cardamom seed
1 whole clove
5 peppercorns
1/4 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/8 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 pound ground lamb
1 teaspoon yogurt
1″ cube fresh ginger, peeled and cut into chunks
2 large cloves garlic, peeled
2 scallions, white and light green parts only
7 large fresh spearmint leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
scant amount of oil to pan fry
1/2 cup packed cilantro leaves
1/4 cup packed Thai basil leaves
1/4 cup packed spearmint leaves
dark green tops of one scallion
zest of 1/2 lime
5 red Thai chilies
juice of 2 limes
salt to taste

Method:

Toast the first six ingredients lightly over medium heat in a heavy bottomed skillet. When browned and fragrant, pour into a spice grinder and grind to a powder. Mix with the rest of the ingredients up to but not including the scant oil to pan fry, kneading the meat mixture gently with your hands. Do not knead roughly.

Gently form into round patties about three inches in diameter and 1/2 inch thick.

Set aside for a few minutes while you prepare the chutney.

Take all the rest of the ingredients up to but not including the lime juice and grind thoroughly in a food grinder. Put red-flecked green paste in a bowl and stir in lime juice. Salt to taste.

In a wide, heavy bottomed skillet, heat a small amount of canola oil over medium heat. When the pan is smoking hot, add the patties, and leave them in position for at least two minutes, or until a crust forms on the bottom, and the patties are easily picked up with a spatula and flipped. Cook for eight minutes, or until the other side is browned and somewhat crisp and the inside is a pale pink and very tender.

When patties are done, serve them atop rice, drizzled with yogurt and topped with some the Incendiary Green Chutney.

Eat it and weep tears of joy and pain from the chutney’s relentless firepower. (Or at least, eat it and your nose will run!)

Now see, that wasn’t so hard, was it? And it was mighty good too–admit it.

Good enough to make again, I’ll wager.

Eggplant is one of my favorite vegetables of all time.

Even though, when I was growing up, it only appeared on my Grandma or Mom’s tables fried with marinara sauce (and there’s nothing wrong with that, mind you), fairly early on in life I was introduced to moussaka and baba ganoush through Mom’s Greek friends, Pete and Sylvia, and my Aunt Nancy, who’s half Syrian, and loved all sorts of eggplant-based goodies. (Half Syrian, half Portuguese, and ALL good. I love Aunt Nancy, who lovingly broadened my food horizons from a very early age, God bless her.) My Uncle George, Mom’s brother and Aunt Nancy’s husband, loved Eggplant Parmesan so much that it was the only thing he ordered at Joe Fazio’s when we went out to celebrate his birthday, but even so, he’d let me have a bite to try it when I was very, very small. Fried eggplant, great marinara and melted mozzarella cheese–what’s not to love?

But, when I was younger, the only eggplant I knew about or ate was the Rubenesque deep violet aubergines that are commonly grown throughout the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions. I’d never heard of, or even seen one of the long, thin, pale violet colored Asian Eggplants that are now fairly commonly seen in farmer’s markets, Asian markets and even some regular old grocery stores around the US.

They don’t even really look like eggplants being that they aren’t egg shaped, but are instead slender and curved, like long, stretched out teardrops. Most commonly they are either deep purple, like their plump cousins, or a pretty rosy violet color, but sometimes they are white, or striped violet and white or even a pretty mint green.

No matter what color these pretty Asian eggplants are, they have several things in common. One, when picked young, they have very few seeds. Two, they almost all lack any of the bitterness which can sometimes plague the more common chubby eggplants, and so never need to be pre-treated with salt. Three, they do share the ability to act as sponges with their larger cousins, and so are very good at taking up and holding flavorful sauces and oils.

They are used in the cuisines of China, Japan and Thailand, where their abilities to soak up flavor is used to great effect. In Japan, they are grilled with a miso marinade, in Thailand they are cooked in coconut milk-based curries, and in China, they can be either deep fried or stir fried then served in a sauce.

My personal favorite is a Sichuan dish where thin slices or slender shreds of young Asian eggplant are stir fried with minced pork and served with what is technically called, “Fish Flavored Sauce,” but which is usually translated into English as “Garlic Sauce.” The eggplant is soft and slippery and bathed in the darkly sweet, hot, tangy sauce, while the minced pork bits are sweet and a bit chewy. Sometimes shreds or slices of fresh water chestnut are used to add crispness and a shattering sugar flavor to the dish, but I’ve most often had it in restaurants with just the eggplant and pork.

Eggplants are madly in season right now–there are piles of them in all shapes, sizes and colors at the Farmer’s Market these days, so I picked up a couple of the little Asian ones to add to some stir fry or another.

It wasn’t until I was digging around in the vegetable drawer to find something for dinner a couple of nights later that I came up with this dish which is a twist on the traditional Sichuan Eggplant with Pork and Garlic Sauce that I love, but seldom find in restaurants. Lacking fresh water chestnuts, I came upon some beautiful green beans and decided to use those to make a crispy counterpoint to the richly soft and unctuous eggplant.

Since the green beans are long and thin, I decided to cut the eggplant into shreds to match the shape of the beans. According to Chinese culinary traditions, matching the shapes of your ingredients is a more aesthetic way to cook, and it ensures that foods cook evenly in the wok. Cutting Asian eggplants into shreds is simple–just cut the fruits into steeply diagonal 1/4″ thick slices so that you are making long ovals, then stack the slices and cut those into 1/4″ wide shreds. Voila–simplicity itself.

Instead of mincing the pork tenderloin (which is what I had), I shredded it as well–by cutting it into slices against the grain, and then cutting each slice into a 1/4″ thick shred.

When it came to cooking the dish–I put the eggplant into the wok not long after the pork so it had plenty of time to soak up the flavors of the minced scallion, garlic and ginger that is put into the wok on top of the pork. Basically, I waited until the pork was half cooked–the colors showing were equal parts brown and pink–before tossing in the eggplant, and then stir fried as normal, putting in the blanched green beans when most of the pork shows brown instead of pink. Then, in went the already blended sauce components, and within about a minute and a half, the sauce is reduced and thickened, everything is cooked through and all that is needed is a sprinkling of scallion tops to bring everything to a delicious finish.

How did it taste?

Amazing. Using green beans in a dish of eggplant and pork with garlic sauce may not be traditional, but I don’t care, because it’s damned good. Zak said it was one of the best things I’ve cooked in a long while, and he and I and Kat pretty much ate the entire platter in one sitting.

Mind you, I said almost. There was also enough left over the next morning for a nice cold topping over warmed over rice for breakfast.

And yeah, it makes a great breakfast, too.

Eggplant, Pork and Green Beans with Garlic Sauce
Ingredients:

2 tbsp. rice vinegar
2 tbsp. black rice vinegar
2 tbsp. dark soy sauce
1 tbsp. Shao Hsing wine
2 tbsp. sugar
2 tsp. chili garlic paste
1/4 tsp. sesame oil
1 teaspoon cornstarch
2 tablespoons canola or peanut oil
1/2 pound pork tenderloin, shredded as explained above, then tossed with 1 teaspoon Shao Hsing wine or sherry and 1 tablespoon cornstarch (about 2 cups after cutting)
5 large garlic cloves, minced
4 scallions, white and light green parts only, minced
1″ cube fresh ginger, minced
2 small young Asian eggplants, shredded as directed above–about 2 cups after cutting
1 1/2 cups young green beans, stringed and blanched then drained
dark green tops of the 4 scallions up above, sliced thinly on the diagonal for garnish

Method:

Stir together the first eight ingredients–from the vinegar to the cornstarch–in a small cup or bowl until well combined. Set aside.

Heat wok over a burner on high until a thin ribbon of smoke spirals up from the steel or iron surface. Pour in the canola or peanut oil and heat for another 30-60 seconds, until the oil shimmers and moves lightly over the surface of the wok.

Add the pork in one layer and allow to sit on the surface of the wok, undisturbed, for a minute, or until the meat browns well on the bottom side. As soon as the pork is settled into the wok and arranged so it can brown, sprinkle the minced scallion, garlic and ginger evenly over the meat, then sprinkle the eggplant evenly over that.

Once the meat is well browned on the bottom, stir and fry until most of the meat is brown with only a little bit of pink showing. Some of the aromatic bits will likely stick to the wok, but don’t worry over that much. Add the green beans and stir fry for about ten seconds, then pour in the sauce ingredients, and cook, stirring and scraping until the sauce boils and thickens and everything is fragrant and cooked through.

Stir in the scallion tops, and remove from heat. Scrape into a heated platter and serve immediately with steamed rice.

Why the rhyme?

I dunno.

Except, that somehow, the combination of those three ingredients -does- taste like sunshine. Like warm summer sunshine in a garden filled with flowers and buzzing bees. Really. Put the three together and then cook it and slather it on anything, and suddenly, even if its midwinter, you’ll feel like you’re hanging out with the bees, humming along and sipping nectar.

It’s the damnedest thing.

And if it actually -is- summer, and you use it on vegetables you just harvested from your garden, and pork from a local farmer, well, hot damn! It’s like summer inside, outside and all around.

I reckon you could use this sauce to make anything, but I did it as a stir fry with zucchini, haricot vert (those are wee tiny slender French green beans) and some beautiful multicolored (red and yellow) carrots, all of which were plucked, picked and pulled out of our garden by Kat. The pork was a single solitary pork chop that really only served to add a little protein and extra flavor to the vegetables and rice that we ate with it–but I have to say that the next time I grill pork–I reckon some version of this sauce will show slathered all over it. Same could be said for grilled eggplant. Or braised chicken. Or baked salmon. Or portabello mushroom caps stuffed with spelt pilaf and baked.

I don’t usually put zucchini into stir fries here at home, not because it isn’t good in stir fried dishes, but because Zak, until recently, (like until two days ago) didn’t like zucchini under any circumstances. So, I really only cooked it for myself, or myself and Morganna when she lived here, or myself and guests, always in separate dishes. BUT, because Kat picked this zucchini with her own little hands, she wanted to taste it and in order to support her on trying a new food, Zak said he’d try it to.

Woo hoo! And to the kitchen, I galumphed and promptly went to work with my knife.

Since the haricot vert are so slender, I used them as the basis for how I cut all the other vegetables–and the meat–which means I cut everything into thin julienne strips. To do this with either carrots or zucchini, or in fact, with anything cylindrical, is simpler than it would seem. All you have to do is make diagonal horizontal slices that are thin oval shapes first, then stack those and cut them into thin vertical slices. That’s all. Not hard, huh?

Meat is a bit harder to cut so thinly. The best way is to partially freeze the meat so you can cut it into thin horizontal slices, and then cut them into vertical strips, just like you did with the firmer vegetables. If you meat is thawed all the way, it simply is a beast to try and cut like that. Be patient and firm it all up in the freezer before you start.

The cutting is all the hard part–the rest is perfectly simple. Toss the meat in a bit of tamari, which is a Japanese style of soy sauce that doesn’t contain any wheat. It’s just fermented soybeans. Add some mirin–that is a sweetened rice wine, also from Japan–and then toss in some cornstarch and mix it all up until a thick marinade coats the meat.

Then, make a bit of sauce–mix together some more tamari and mirin, then add a little bit of vegetable broth or chicken stock, some honey and a goodly amount of shiro miso–that’s white miso–which is a mild, fragrant fermented soybean paste, and whisk it all together until it’s smooth.

Then, get ready and fire up the wok–because dinner is almost done.

How did they like the zucchini?

Well, Kat loved the sauce. She ate extra over her rice, which was exceptional for her, because she usually likes her rice plain. And she loved the beans and the carrots and ate inordinate amounts of them. And the pork was very much to her liking.

But, the zucchini–alas–was not her thing.

Zak tried the zucchini and declared it, “Inoffensive.” Which is a lot coming from him. (It wasn’t until the next day when I sauteed a zuke in just plain old good olive oil and salted it well at the end that he declared it, “Downright tasty,” and ate several pieces of it.)

As for me–I ate up the zucchini from the dish that they didn’t eat, and gladly, because it was delectable with this sauce combination. Especially after I added a little bit of toasted sesame oil at the end–it became almost my favorite way to cook and eat zucchini. I say almost, because I still like it best with just some olive oil, salt and maybe a fresh herb or two.

Anyway, here’s the recipe for a dish that would be just as good if you substituted a good pressed tofu for the pork.

Summer Vegetables and Pork with Tamari,-Miso-Honey Sauce
Ingredients:

I like to play with cooking techniques when I come up with new dishes.

For example–I like to take the French techniques I learned in culinary school and apply them to other cuisines. Usually what happens is I end up with a recipe that tastes both traditional and sublime–the flavors of the original cuisine are there, and are simply boosted and magnified by using French techniques.

The results are subtle, and are not really what I would call a “fusion’ dish–to me, fusion cuisine is where the flavors AND techniques from two or more cuisines are mingled–hopefully in a sensible and respectful fashion–creating a dish that is completely new. In combining traditional flavors with a “foreign” technique, you end up with an original dish that tastes exactly like the original cuisine, but with some subtle difference in flavor, texture or mouthfeel.

This dish, for example, is basically an Indian lamb curry.

But, instead of cooking the meat in a water or yogurt based sauce, I cooked it in a stock, then reduced the resulting liquid into a thick, meat flavored sauce. The resulting sauce was then enriched with minced herbs (fresh cilantro from my garden and curry leaves) and smoothed out with a generous tablespoon and a half of Greek yogurt, then perked up with a squeeze of lemon juice. If I hadn’t reduced the stock first, I’d have had to use much more yogurt to thicken the sauce, and it would have diluted the rich meat flavor of the sauce.

This really is a simple and fast curry to make, especially if you have a pressure cooker. (Fear not–if you have no pressure cooker, a regular soup pot will do, it will just take a bit longer to cook!) The flavors are strong and clean, and go perfectly with a plain steamed basmati rice or a simple pilau with few ingredients.

It’s also good with a beautiful green salad, or maybe a dish of Bengali Summer Squash, since around here, zucchini, crookneck and pattypan squashes are all starting to come in, and this lamb dish would taste divine with squash on the side.

Lamb With Cilantro and Curry Leaf Sauce
Ingredients:

3 tablespoons ghee, canola oil or coconut oil
1 medium yellow onion, peeled and very thinly sliced
1 teaspoon salt
2 pounds lamb, cut into 1″ cubes and patted dry
3 to 4 large cloves garlic, minced
1″ cube fresh ginger, peeled and minced
1-3 red or green Thai chilies–to taste–stems removed and minced
10 fresh curry leaves
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1/4 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
3 whole cloves
1/4 inch chunk cinnamon bark
25 green cardamom pods
1/4 teaspoon black peppercorns (you may add more of these to taste)
1 1/2 teaspoons dried turmeric powder
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1 1/2-2 1/2 cups lamb or chicken stock (For a pressure cooker, use 1 1/2-2 cups, for a regular pot use 2 1/2 cups)
2 heaping tablespoons Greek yogurt
salt to taste
1 tablespoon Aleppo pepper flakes
1 cup tightly packed fresh cilantro leaves
8 fresh curry leaves
whole cilantro leaves for garnish

Method:

Heat ghee or oil over medium heat in the bottom of either a pressure cooker or a large heavy bottomed pot. Add onion, slices, sprinkle with salt and stir. Cook, stirring, until the onion is a nice golden brown color.

Add the lamb, and spread so it is in an even layer over top of the onions. Cook undisturbed for about two minutes.

Sprinkle the minced garlic, ginger and chilies, and the whole curry leaves over the meat. Grind all of the whole spices into a powder and sprinkle over the meat, along with the turmeric and paprika.

Cook, stirring, until the lamb is mostly browned and the entire mixture smells very good. Pour in the stock and deglaze the pan carefully, scraping up any browned bits at the bottom.

If using a pressure cooker, bring the liquid to a boil, put the lid on the pressure cooker, lock it in place and bring up to full pressure. Turn down the heat to low, and cook for fifteen minutes, then remove from the burner and use the quick release method to release pressure and open the cooker.

For a regular pot, bring to a boil, cover, and turn heat down and simmer until the lamb is fork tender–about 40-45 minutes.

For both the pressure cooker and the regular pot, remove cover and return the heat to high. Boil to reduce the liquid until it thickens and is at about 1/3 of the starting volume. Basically, there should not be very much liquid left in the pot.

Add the two tablespoons of yogurt and stir well to combine. Turn the heat down and simmer 1 minute to incorporate the yogurt. Taste now for salt and add more if necessary.

Grind up the cilantro leaves and the 8 curry leaves in a food processor into a very finely minced green flurry. Scrape these tiny verdant bits into the pot and turn off heat. Stir well to incorporate. Stir in the Aleppo pepper flakes and then serve over rice on warmed plates immediately, garnishing with whole cilantro leaves.

This makes enough for 4-6 people, depending on what all else you serve with it.