The Best Recipe I Ever Made: Almond, Poppy Seed, and Fig Shahjahani Leg of Lamb

I can never try opium. This is not a problem or anything, but I just know that I can't try it or I'll become addicted. If I can become addicted to the toasted poppy seeds in this recipe this easily (which are not addictive at all, but are derived from the same plant as opium), then there's no hope for me with the harder drug. If I were Jewish I think I'd have no choice but to become an addict. So much hamantash and rugelach. Purim would, ironically, be like a personal request for me to sin.

I'd never made a leg of lamb before, and since it was the week after Easter, I figured there would be lamb on sale, the kind that needed to be sold after not enough Christians, Greek Orthodox, and Jews had bought whole legs in Newfoundland (there were, however huge sales on hams...). I kind of forgot that there's no such thing as fresh lamb legs in Newfoundland, so neither were there any specials on the 4 frozen ones in the whole province. Still, I'd found a leg of lamb recipe in Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking that is traditionally made for Muslim banquets, and I really wanted to make some thing elaborate and special. I was looking for something glamourous in the Indian food repertoire, something reserved for special occasions. I found my pot of gold.

This is actually the best 'meal', 'dish', 'recipe', etc. that I've ever made, and I don't say that lightly. This wins. Simple as that.

The dish is composed of one huge leg of lamb that's marinated for 48 hours in a yogurt, onion, and spice blend (I used almond breeze, which makes the marinade a fair bit soupier, but works well with the other almonds in the recipe), and then slow-cooked in the oven for more than 3 hours.

There are 2 things that make the dish amazing:

1. Toasted ground almonds and poppy seeds are used to thicken the sauce. No butter or flour.
2. Dried figs are placed in the roasting pan halfway through the roasting time, and they absorb the lamb juice and oil, so when the dish is done the figs burst in your mouth, like they were made confit, or drowned in honey syrup. There's just nothing like it. The juicy sweetness of the resuscitated figs, the nutty flavour of the almonds and the incredible flavour of the poppy seeds make this...well, I have no words. Yes, I(!) have no words.

Ingredients
One huge leg of lamb
1 container of Almond Breeze (or 1 1/2 cartons of plain yogurt)
2 1/2 medium onions
7 cloves of garlic
A 7-inch piece of ginger!
5 teaspoons of salt (it's a lot of meat to season)!
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tbsp garam masala
1 1/4 cup blanched almonds
16 dried figs
Lots of vegetable oil, or another bland oil that can take high heat
6 tablespoons white poppy seeds (I didn't have white, but the only difference is apparently the resulting colour of the dish)

I took a huge metal baking dish for the lamb and poured in the almond breeze, then I took 4 tbsp of it out of the dish and put it into the blender along with one coarsely chopped onion, the garlic, ginger, salt, cayenne, and garam masala. This spice blend was then added back to the rest of the almond breeze in the dish and mixed together. It's supposed to be creamy and thick from a fairly high-fat yogurt, but this worked just fine, and in the end it left more sauce to scoop on top of the meat, since the yogurt would cook more and disappear.

Then I removed the "parchment-like" outer skin and the excess fat from the leg of lamb. I had no idea what Jaffrey meant by parchment-like skin until I started removing fat. There is this transparent film that comes off, so I tried to remove as much of that as I could without driving myself insane. I wanted to get as much of the fat off as possible, since it's hard to strain the fat off the sauce once the almonds and poppy seeds have been added to the sauce later in the recipe, and there's so much fat in the leg itself that any I could see on the outside would just be unnecessary. This was not going to be a dry leg of lamb no matter how much fat I cut off.

Then the leg got stabbed deeply all over and covered in the marinade. I opened up the wounds and tried to get the almond breeze inside as much as possible. Then the whole leg was covered with plastic wrap and put into the fridge for 2 whole days. I had grand plans to rotate the leg on the second day, so the upper side of the lamb was as marinated as the bottom, but that plan didn't come to fruition. I can't imagine the lamb being more tender, though, so either I don't know what I'm missing or it wasn't a big deal. Sweet willful ignorance.

So on the first day, the leg rested, and on the second day the oven got preheated to 350F. The baking dish was placed on a stove burner and the marinade was brought to a simmer. I was surprised how quickly this happened, actually. I thought it would take an age to heat all that milk, but soon enough the marinade was heated through. So I tightly wrapped the lamb in aluminum foil and stuck it in the oven for the first 1 1/2 hours.

Now the grinding began. I love my father's coffee grinder. Grinders cost $10-$20 and they're one of the best investments you can make for Indian cooking. Sure, a mortar and pestle is great, but it takes a long time and a huge mortar to grind 1 1/4 cups of almonds. Sure, a blender will work, but it often gets stuck, and then you end up with pieces of rubber spatula in your almonds after trying to press them down toward the blades. A food processor works but it's a pain to clean and it seems like overkill. The only other decent option is the food processor attachment for an emulsion blender (I think that's the name of it - the hand blender that looks like a big rod that you stick directly into big pots of soup to purée). The attachment is usually the right size for grinding a cup of something, like almonds.

Anyway, frying pan over medium heat. Add almonds. Stir every now and then until almonds release aroma and are slightly browned. Grind. The toasting is completely essential. The flavour of un-toasted almonds is nothing, but toasting them is another story entirely. After 1 1/2 hours of lamb-roasting, I removed the dish from the oven and added the ground almonds to the sauce. Now is the part where I had no idea of the importance of my actions. I scattered the dried figs around the leg. The recipe didn't say anything about stirring them into the sauce, so I just scattered as I was told, re-wrapped the leg in the foil and put the whole thing back in the oven for another 1 1/2 hours. I had no idea how incredible the result of the simple act of sprinkling dried figs into a lamb sauce would be. Who knew? Apparently all of India. Also, Vietnam, according to the incredible Book of Salt (a fiction book, not recipe book). Oh, I also turned the lamb leg over in the pan so the dryer top would have a chance to be submerged in the liquid and be more moist. The recipe didn't tell me to do this, but it seemed like a good idea.

Now the poppy seeds got toasted. Same formula as the almonds. Frying pan, medium heat. Add poppy seeds. Stir from time to time until seeds are slightly darker (only problem here was my seeds were already dark, so I waited for some kind of aroma and figured that it should certainly not cook for more than 5 minutes). I have a theory about the next part of the recipe, but I could be completely wrong. Jaffrey says to let the seeds cool before grinding them, but there was no "let cool" instruction for the almonds before. Apparently almonds can be ground hot. My guess is that the poppy seeds are already finer, so getting them into the spice grinder without spilling them everywhere is hard. Add to this difficulty a hot frying pan and you have a recipe for a burning. So Jaffrey's trying to save the hands of amateur Indian cooks everywhere, I think.

Now fried onions. Someone told me once that fried onions were the best part of biryani, an elaborate rice dish with saffron and yogurt that always seems dry to me. The onions really do pop, though, and this from someone who absolutely hates fast food onion rings. They're not caramelized, so they're not sweet, but they're not raw, so they're not bitter either. They're a delicacy and a garnish in Indian cooking. So I deep fry-ed.

A large plate got lined with a bunch of paper towels and I added a 1/4-inch of vegetable oil to my frying pan set to medium-high heat. When it got hot (I've never heated so much oil before in a frying pan, so I didn't know how long the 'getting hot' process would take. Tossing a bit of water on the oil and seeing if it popped worked well) I added the two other onions which I'd cut in very, very fine rings. Slivers, really. Then the onions are stirred and cooked until they start to brown...but they didn't brown very evenly, and "start to" is a very ambiguous term. The onions that escaped the oil by trying to climb up the sides of the frying pan got brown, but I didn't think that counted. They certainly didn't "brown at the edges" like Jaffrey said they would. So after about 5 minutes I continued with the next step of turning the heat to medium. Again the onions were supposed to get reddish brown and crisp. Maybe I used too much oil? Kind of seemed like if the onions were exposed more on the top they would have browned and crisped up, since that was exactly my downfall with duck confit. Oh well. I removed the onions with a slotted spoon to the paper towels, where some of the oil was pressed out of them. So now I have a cup and a half of re-usable vegetable oil (flavoured with onion) sitting in my parents' fridge, 3 cups of re-usable duck fat sitting in my brother's freezer, and zero re-usable anything fat in my own apartment. I can basically guarantee that I would be the only one to actually think to use these stored fats. Oh I hate kitchen waste. If only I deep-fried more things I could use up the vegetable oil here...Some things just aren't worth it.

After the second 1 1/2 hours the lamb again was removed from the oven and the poppy seeds and drained onions were added to the sauce. The onions were supposed to be crumbled into the sauce (since they were so crisp), but the translucent slivers were just tossed in reluctantly. Then the lamb got basted with the sauce a little, re-wrapped again, and put back in the oven for another 10 minutes to let the sauce combine.

I can't believe I didn't take a picture. I am kicking myself. The lamb is served by removing the meat from the baking dish to a serving platter with a lip, digging the figs out of the sauce and arranging them around the meat, removing any fat from the sauce (this is impossible because of the ground poppy seeds and almonds getting in the way), and then ladling the sauce (or some of the sauce, since it's a lot and will probably overflow the platter) around the lamb. Yogurt would have given a much richer, creamier sauce, but I can't even complain. The almond breeze made it a different, but more saucy dish, which I generally prefer. The lamb was even still medium rare in some places after 3 hours! It was perfect! The top part that hadn't received as much of the liquid in marinating (since "on the first day it rested", instead of being rotated) was a little more 'medium'. The leg wasn't much to look at since the outside isn't seared, there's no golden colour, and the whiteness of the almond breeze makes it look kind of slimy. The blackness of the poppy seeds, however, makes it look kind of speckled. There is no creature in nature to which this roast resembles...but oh, it was good.

Sweet and a little salty. Savoury, creamy and rich. Thick, but textured. A bed of spiced basmati rice soaked up the incredible sauce. The figs. I had no idea figs could cook like that. With the rich lamb, they were...

I could die from joy from this dish. If someone made this for me I would melt, just like the lamb on my tongue. It's a miraculous recipe...well, no, it's an amazing recipe that's taken centuries to perfect. Indian culinary history is incredible...everyone should be lucky enough to eat this lamb, and the beautiful thing is that anyone can make it.