SLOW COOKER TURMERIC BRAISED CHICKEN - LAWANG

By Humaira

I have to admit, many Afghan recipes take time: at least an hour or two in the kitchen, fresh ingredients and planning ahead. But with busy lives, we don’t always have the luxury to cook for hours at a time. This is perhaps why our friends Kristine and Ellen asked us for Afghan recipes using a slow cooker.

We are answering the call for quick and simple crock pot dishes by devoting the next month or so to the slow cooker. Like all of you, as my life has grown busier I have turned to the slow cooker to help deliver warm dinners to my family. I have been using a slow cooker once a week for the past few years: usually on the days when I leave the house in the morning and return around 6pm with hungry children. I usually make beef stew, chili, or raid my fridge for ingredients to throw into the crock pot and see what awaits us eight hours later upon returning home. I also use the slow cooker for entertaining, something I have been doing a lot lately. It allows me to prep ahead, frees up a burner, and sometimes even means one less dish to wash since for more casual entertaining, you can take the crock pot right out of the cooker and onto the table.

Since we love our readers and we know you too have busy lives, we have selected some Afghan recipes that work well in a slow cooker. We plan to share them with you over the next few weeks, starting with today’s recipe for our beloved Lawang. This is a rich and flavorful chicken dish braised with turmeric, coriander and finished with a creamy yogurt sauce. The stove-top version of the recipe was posted last fall. The slow cooker version is delicious, easy and efficient. We hope you will enjoy trying our star dish, Lawang, in the slow cooker version.

Slow Cooker Turmeric Braised Chicken in Yogurt

Lawang

1/4 cup olive oil

2 large onions, finely chopped or pureed in food processor

4 cloves garlic, finely chopped or pureed with the onions

3 lbs skinless, bone-in chicken legs and thighs, separated

1 1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. ground black pepper

1 tbsp. ground turmeric

1 1/2tsp. ground coriander

1/2 cup chicken broth or water

1 ½ cups Greek-style yogurt, room temperature*

1 cup fresh cilantro, roughly chopped

Wash the chicken and pat dry with a dish towel. Put the chicken in the crock pot.

Heat the oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pan. Cook the onions and garlic over medium-high heat for 15 minutes until deeply browned. Add the salt, pepper, turmeric, coriander and water to the onions and stir well. Spoon the onion mixture over the chicken, stirring it to evenly cover the chicken pieces. Put on the lid and set the slow cooker on low for 4 hours. 

When the chicken is cooked, stir the yogurt and add it along with the cilantro to the crock pot. Give everything a good stir to make sure the yogurt dissolves in the sauce.

* to bring the yogurt to room temperature, pull it out of the fridge about a half hour before you add it to the crock pot.

Note: If you plan to prep the night before, brown the onions and the garlic. Add the salt, pepper, turmeric, coriander and water to the onions and stir well and keep in a lidded container. Clean the chicken and refrigerate. The next day all you have to do is mix all the ingredients and let is cook.

Serves 4-6

Except where otherwise noted, all content on this blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.

ROAST CHICKEN WITH AFGHAN SPICE RUB

By Katie

If you are new to this blog you can probably surmise from the photo that I, of light hair, blue eyes and freckled skin, am not the Afghan in the duo. My experience of Afghan food and culture is borrowed -- largely from Humaira and her family who have graciously allowed me to invade their kitchens and watch them work magic behind the stove.

Unlike Humaira, I don’t have decades of Afghan home life to draw upon for inspiration in my cooking. And Afghanistan isn’t exactly the sort of place to plan a culinary vacation. If I’d set my sights on the likes of Italy or Spain I would happily pack up my young brood and set out for an adventure in food. All of this makes writing about Afghan cuisine an added challenge. I’m an interloper. So when an opportunity presents itself that inspires my sensibilities, I don’t hesitate.

Such was the case recently when my neighbors Luke and Catherine were coming for dinner. Although we’ve shared many meals together, Afghan food was never on the menu. I was hesitant to get too exotic since they would be joined by their two totally delightful, but not especially adventurous (at least food-wise) young boys.

I settled on a roast chicken dinner; it was Sunday supper after all. But with a twist: traditional roasting method, non-traditional seasonings. I set out all of my favorite Afghan spices and concocted a spice rub using equal parts coriander, cumin, paprika, garlic, turmeric, and salt. After squeezing a halved Meyer lemon over the whole bird, I patted it generously with the Afghan spice rub and put it in the oven to roast.

The richly colored spice mix made for a beautifully browned bird with flavors that satisfied adults and kids alike. I served it with a big bowl of sabzi (an Afghan recipe for braised spinach topped with yogurt); pita bread brushed with olive oil, sprinkled with salt and then warmed in the oven; a grated carrot salad flavored with coarse mustard, lemon juice and a dash of sugar; and jasmine rice steamed with bay leaf, and enriched with a knob of salted butter.

The meal came together with ease. Luke and Catherine tucked in heartily to all of the dishes. As for the boys, they didn’t seem to know or care that they were eating anything particularly interesting. As far as they were concerned, it was just chicken, and more importantly, what were we having for dessert?

Roast Chicken with Afghan Spice Rub

1 whole chicken, rinsed and patted dry

½ tsp. ground coriander

½ tsp. ground paprika

½ tsp. ground cumin

½ tsp. turmeric

½ tsp. garlic powder

½ tsp. Kosher salt

1 lemon, cut in half

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Set the chicken in a roasting pan, preferably on a roasting rack. In a small bowl stir together the 4 spices, the garlic powder and the salt. Squeeze both halves of the lemon over the chicken and then stuff into the cavity of the bird. Gently pat the spice rub evenly over the entire chicken. Roast the chicken until done, 45 minutes to an hour depending on the size of the bird.

Except where otherwise noted, all content on this blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.

AFGHAN BEEF JERKEY RICE - LAWNDEE PALAU

By Humaira

I have happy memories of Kabul winters: Snow fights, sledding off the garden wall on metal trays into our backyard, and best of all, no school. Unlike the rest of the year, in the winter my family shared all three meals together. Each meal seemed like a big event. We ate hearty soups, stews, casseroles and rice dishes such as aush, shohla, kitchree quroot and lawndee. They are filling, nourishing and warming. I loved all of these dishes but my favorite was lawndee palau, a rice delicacy made with salted and dried lamb, lamb jerky, if you will.

I can only guess that the practice of drying meat started when people were house bound in the winters with no refrigeration and no access to fresh meat. Even though we were able to move around Kabul in the winter, our family still practiced this tradition, as did many others.

In the fall when the weather started cooling off, perhaps late September or early October, my family would buy one or two slaughtered lambs. The lambs were brought to us by Agha Lala, the head farmer on our land in Ghazni, about a two-hour drive from Kabul. Agha Lala would butcher the lamb, always a big event at our house. No part of the lamb was wasted including the dumba, the fat in the rear of the lamb. This prized piece of lamb would be fried for lunch and we would savor each chewy, salty bite along with a piece of nan bread. Any leftover dumba would be rolled into the fresh dough of that day’s bread and baked. Once again we would enjoy the rich, fatty bites.

Once the lamb was butchered meat it would be thoroughly salted, pierced in the middle and strung up to dry using nylon rope. The meat would hang on the side of the house where it would get plenty of fall sun but was out of reach of neighborhood cats, our dog Rusty and other meat-loving creatures. After four to six weeks the meat would be dried and we would share some of it with family and neighbors as a special gift. The dried meat was kept in lidded containers and stored in the attic where it was cool, and dry.

Over the course of the winter months various delicacies would be made with this meat but the most popular was lawndee palau, a slow-cooked rice dish with raisins. We would squeeze oranges or lemons over the rice and meat to balance the richness and saltiness of the lamb. In our 30 years of residence in the US my mom, Jeja has not made lawndee palau. Perhaps at first it was because the dried meat was not available. But even now that lawndee is sold at most Afghan markets in the Bay Area, she still doesn’t make it.

So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that my aunt Khala Mayen was going to make lawndee palau during her visit over the holidays.I spent the better part of an afternoon with her, leaving my children and visiting in-laws to fend for themselves so that I could learn to make what was one of my favorite childhood dishes. She is famous for her lawndee palau. To insure best results she went so far as to haul her own cookware from her home in Orange County, pots large enough to bathe a toddler.

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My aunt explained that the best lawndee should be completely dry and white in color as you see above. She didn’t trust the quality of the lawndee in the Bay Area so she brought meat from her own trusted source.

Below marks the process Khala Mayen took to make lawndee palau:

-She washed about 10 pounds of meat three times in cold water, and then soaked it overnight in a big pot.

-The next morning she rinsed 10 cups of long grain rice three times and soaked it in a large bowl.

-She soaked 2 cups of black raisins in warm water.

-She chopped two onions and sautéed them in ½ cup of vegetable oil.

-She drained the meat and then added it to the onion mixture along with enough water to cover the meat. After bringing it to a boil, she dropped the temperature to low and cooked it for an hour or so until it was soft and the liquid had reduced. She scooped off the fat from the top of the pot.

-Khala Mayen makes her own fried onions, which she uses generously in palau and other dishes. She added a few scoops of the onions and cooked the meat another 10-20 minutes until the sauce took on a deep brown color. She separated the meat and the sauce in two separate bowls.

-She boiled the rice until al dente and drained the water. She then returned the rice to the pot with the sauce from the cooked meat along with Jeja’s pre-mixed palau spices (coriander, black pepper, black and green cardamom) and a generous amount of salt. All the ingredients were mixed together until all the grains of rice were coated with the sauce.

-She piled the cooked meat on top of the rice. She topped all of this off with an additional cup of vegetable oil and an entire stick of butter (to which I gasped over the amount of fat).

-She wrapped the raisins in aluminum foil and placed them on top of the rice to cook along with the rice.

-She baked this giant pot of rice and meat in the oven at 500 degrees for 20 minutes and then baked it another 30 minutes at 250 degrees.

As the lawndee cooked a strong scent of lamb filled the kitchen. It’s a smell many Afghans savor, but it frankly overwhelmed my senses. This didn’t stop me from hovering nearby when my aunt pulled the pot from the oven. I wanted to take in the lovely sight of golden brown long rice kernels, the plump raisins and the flaky pieces of meat. Khala Mayen was worried that she didn’t make enough food but I assured her that she made enough to feed the whole neighborhood.

As she was putting the rice onto my mom’s unusually large serving platter, she kept worrying that the rice was too dry. Her daughters told me that normally oil drips from Khala Mayen’s lawndee palau that no orange or lemon juice could cut through that fat. I think secretly Khala Mayen blamed me for the lack of oil in this dish.

Everyone loved the lawndee palau. Our Iranian friend Sasha had three large servings and then promptly took a nap.I was surprised to find I didn’t enjoy the dish as much as I had remembered. Don’t get me wrong, I ate a plateful, and it was tasty, but the combination of the lamb scent and seeing the amount of oil and butter that went into the dish didn’t sit well with my Americanized sensibilities.

Cooked lawndee

Right out of the oven

Aunt Mayen serving the coveting lawndee palau

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Except where otherwise noted, all content on this blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.