South Sudanese Entree
SHAIYAH
(Pan fried meat)
INGREDIENTS
2½ pounds lamb, beef, or goat
2 cups water.
¾ red onion (¼ red onion more later)
2 stalks celery
4 garlic cloves
1 jalapeno pepper or red chile pepper
1 bay leaf
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ tablespoon coriander
½ tablespoon cumin
1 teaspoon pepper
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
¼ red onion
1 tablespoon lime juice
¼ cup arugula (aka rocket leaves)
SPECIAL UTENSIL
mandoline (optional)
Serves 4. Takes 1 hour 15 minutes.
PREPARATION
Cut meat into 1″ cubes. Add to large pot, enough water to cover meat with 1″ to spare. Bring water to boil at high heat. While water comes to boil, cut ¾ red onion into ¼”-thick slices. (A mandoline helps.) Cut each celery into 4 pieces along its length. Dice garlic cloves. Dice jalapeno pepper. (Seed it first, if you want this dish to be milder.)
Add all but the last 4 ingredients to pot. Cover and cook at medium-high heat for 35 minutes or until water has evaporated, but meat is not yet falling apart. (Stir enough to prevent burning.) Remove bay leaf.
Add oil and ingredients from pot to pan. Sauté at medium-high heat for 15 minutes or until meat browns all over and becomes crispy. Stir frequently enough to prevent meat from burning and sticking to pan.
Add meat to serving plate. Cut ¼ red onion into ¼”-thick slices. Drizzle lime juice over meat. Garnish with red-onion slices and arugula.
TIDBITS
1) I suspect that many readers of this recipe buy their lamb, beef, or goat at the supermarket. This meat comes in nice, little plastic wrapped packages.
2) All we have to do to hunt the meat for our Shaiyah is to sally forth in our little FitTM, BMWTM, or F-150, armed only with a credit card or cash.
3) There’s no danger in that at all. Especially we if remain properly vigilant for stupid oafs running red lights at busy intersections.
4) Hunting safaris are one step closer to getting our own food than moving our carts to the butchers or to the frozen meet section at our supermarket.
5) But not by much, is it? Such hunters arm themselves with high-velocity rifles, equipped with telescopic lenses.
6) It would be something if these safaris had our prey armed with heat-seeking missiles that fired at us whenever we came with 100 yards, or even meters, of them.
7) I mean fair is fair. It’d make hunting safaris unambiguously more exciting as well.
8) But as of press time, this adrenaline-pumping idea remains unlikely to be occur anytime soon.
9) So we don’t know what is was like to say, hunt a mastodon for our meal. How did cavemen bring down their meals on feet or hooves? Sad to say, I don’t know if mastodons have toes or hooves. There aren’t any mastodons in my fair city of Poway.
10) Anyway, Ogg, tried to eat a mastodon by the simple expedient of gnawing on its leg. The mastodon took offense at Ogg’s faux pas and removed him from the human gene pool.
11) Ogg Junior, played a lethal game of rock, stick, stomp with his mastodon. He lost as well.
12) Ogg III, his synapses firing, grabbed a mastodon’s tail. He had hoped to hurl the critter at a fatal speed into a rock cliff. Ogg III did not.
13) Ogg IV tried to frighten a mastodon to death by making scary faces. Another frustrating failure.
14) Indeed Ogg IV to Ogg XIII all met their ends from the mastodon’s tremendously sharp and long tusks or from their massive feet.
15) “What if we turned ourselves into massive feet by letting mud dry on ourselves?” asked the nearly clever Ogg XIV. Many agreed with him. And so Ogg XIV to Ogg XIX would have passed into history had history had only existed back then.
16) Finally Ogg XX postulated making spears out of sticks and sharp flints. OMG, the idea worked! We could have any meat we wanted, including lamb, beef, or goat for our Shaiyah. We all owe a debt of thanks to Ogg XX. Well done, sir.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D. (but not with cell phones)
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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