Professor, CSE
Director, ECSL
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Put your pressure cooker (I assume you have one) on the stove and turn on the heat, baby. Once the oil is hot (if your fingers burn when you touch it), toss in, from across the kitchen, the cinnamon, cloves, and black cardamon. Keep trying till you succeed in shooting the right number of cloves, cardamon, and cinnamon into the pressure cooker. Once the heavenly aroma of cinamon, cloves, and cardomon fills the kitchen and surrounding neighborhood, carefully scrape the onions off the cutting board and into the pressure cooker. You might want to reduce the heat to medium. When the onions become transparent (they really do lose most of their color), you may turn the heat to low or off. You really don't want to burn the onions -- if you do, start over idiot (I mean that in the nicest sense possible).
Its masala time. One by one toss in the salt, turmeric, chili powder, coriander powder, and garam masala. The order in which you toss these masalas in matters. I am not going to tell you the right order. If you plan to become a master chef like me, you will have to experiment to learn the right order. There are only 5! = 120 combinations. Pour in some water. Enough to form a thin veneer across the bottom. Set the flame at medium. If the flame was off turn it on and set it at medium (duh!). Stir like crazy - pause occasionally and see if the oil is separating from the water. When about 3 to 4 minutes have passed, or the water seems to be drying up and the onions have started sticking to the bottom, or you see the oil separating from the water, add the tomotoes. Stir. We are almost ready for the meat.
Add the meat, stir, mix, turn upside down, make sure no hair falls into the pressure cooker. Wear a hat if necessary or buy some rogaine. Now add the secret ingredient - fresh made ginger-garlic paste. I did not put it on the list of ingredients because it is a secret, stupid. You make this paste by using four large cloves of garlic and about a half inch of ginger. You skin both the ginger and the garlic. Ignore all pleas for mercy while skinning. Cut the ginger and garlic into little pieces (as small as you can manage quickly, oh heck, if you want to get technical cut them into 0.125 cm^3 pieces) and mash them. Beat them into bloody pulp. Show no mercy. You are on the home stretch now...
Add the yogurt and enough water to just drown the meat. Shove in a couple of peeled new potatoes if someone unexpectedly shows up while you are cooking. Add the mint leaves. Close the pressure cooker and follow the pressure cooker instructions for how to cook using the pressure cooker.You try making a sentence that contains the words pressure cooker three times -- and makes sense. Mine says to put the weight on, turn the flame to high, wait till there is a loud persistent hiss, then turn the flame to medium and wait for 10 minutes. For no apparent reason, except for a healthy fear of not cooking the meat properly, I usually wait for 15 minutes. Hey! I am still alive.
Before serving, sprinke the coriander over the hot, aromatic, arousing lamb curry while chanting Aum...Aum...Aum. I don't think the chanting helps the taste but it will sure impress your guests. I eat it with basmati rice - incomparably better than any other, I should have patented its genome.
Enjoy!