East Timor - home cooking

East Timor is one of the newest countries that we can expect to encounter during this project, as it gained independence from Indonesia in 2002. (Although God only knows how many new countries will be formed by the time we actually finish the whole thing!). And it was fairly clear quite quickly that I wasn't going to find a restaurant in London serving food from this country specifically.

I opted for a recipe that I found in various places: a lamb and tamarind stew. The dish was an East Timorese twist on a traditional Portuguese dish, usually with fish instead of chicken. East Timor is a former colony of Portugal.

This looked like a fairly simple dish to make, with the majority of the cooking time set aside for the lamb itself, to ensure maximum flavour and tenderness. Like any other stew, really.

Rather than use a block of tamarind to create a paste, I skipped this part and just bought tamarind paste. There was also an option of adding lambs liver and tripe. I opted not to.

I started with about 600g of cubed lamb shoulder and browned this on a high heat, then removed and set aside. In the same pan I then fried two chopped onions for a few minutes until it started to soften, added 3 crushed garlic cloves, some chopped fresh ginger, three sliced lemongrass stalks, 6 chopped red chillies and some turmeric powder and cooked this all together for another couple of minutes. Already the kitchen filled with a fantastic aroma!

This is where the meat was returned to the pot and topped with around 650ml of water mixed with a substantial amount of tamarind paste. Once simmering, the pot was covered, heat reduced to low, and this was left to simmer away for two hours. 

I didn't need to top up the water at any point, and once two hours had passed I removed the lid, turned the heat up to medium and boiled off some of the excess water in the sauce. I then seasoned the pot with some salt and pepper, and finally stirred in some chopped fresh mint.

This looked and smelled amazing. The sauce looked really rich and the consistency was perfect.  It was served up with boiled rice.

The result? A seriously tasty meal. The sweetness of the sauce from the tamarind paste was so good! The lamb was gorgeously tender. The addition of fresh mint at the end really set this meal off, and worked so well with the tamarind. Overall, despite there being a good number of chillies in this meal, the spice was ever-present but nowhere near overpowering. It has to be said the lemongrass ended up being quite chewy and a little too abundant. It made difficult eating at times, but overall this was a seriously enjoyable meal.