28. Chinese spicy Lamb pot

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Chinese spicy lamb pot

What a lovely day! In summer, because of the warm weather, I often lose my desire for food (or cooked food more precisely, coz salad / ’liang cai’ is always great).  How about you?

I like to have something with a very strong heavy taste to help with my appetite, and ... spicy is good. :))

---- So I came up with this dish, and I am super proud of myself -- I ‘designed’ it, well,  it is said that ‘we all stand on the shoulders’ of giants’ -- je je, I am definitely the one standing on the ‘shoulders’ of great chefs when this was cooked, no excuse.:))

Since a good friend told us about a shop where we can get the ‘thinest sliced lamb’, we kept on going back to buy it. This kind of sliced lamb is originally meant for Chinese hot-pot: it is so thin that after dipping into boiling soup for a few seconds, it is ready to eat. But this time I didn’t prepare a big table of hot-pot ingredients for ‘eating while cooking’, then thought I could ‘pre-cook’ the hotpot in a sauce pan on the cooker. Since we didn’t have ‘ready-to-use’ hot pot base, I made it into a spicy soup base with all the ingredients we had at hand.

Spicy Lamb pot

The result was a bit like a typical sichuan dish, which is often called ‘ boiled spicy lamb’ in restaurants, but not as spicy (and the ingredients are also different).

It really came out as a  surprise, I mean a nice surprise -- if you like lamb, this is really great.

The lamb in this dish doesn't have a strong  smell, and the dish is also not very oily. Instead, it is quite fresh and light, especially with the vegetable leaves, and touch of lamb taste in Fensi, and in the end, the coriander just brings the freshness to the maximum --- sorry, where is my Chinese modesty :))

It is a ‘soup based’ dish, if you have read the post on ‘Chinese soup’, you will understand. The meat and vegetables are good to eat just like those in stir-fried dishes, and the soup is great for ‘drinking’ as well.

It is cooked in two steps. First, ‘stir-fry’ the lamb to get rid of the extra fat and ‘lamb’ smell. Second,  boil it in the soup with other ingredients. So it probably takes around 20 minutes, it is really presentable when you have guests over.

Here you go how I did it.

The recipe: Chinese spicy lamb pot

Ingredients

Sliced lamb, (These lamb pieces we got them as frozen from the Chinese supermarket, but if you like, you can buy a piece and chop into thin slices, it is good to have some ‘fat’ on the lamb, it enhance the taste).

Chinese leaves, (mung bean) Fen si, spring onion, garlic, ginger, dried red chilli, coriander, anise star, sichuan peppercorn, salt, goji berries (optional), oil and cooking wine

Preparation

1) Preparing the lamb. If you bought a big piece of lamb, then chop it into thin slice. For chopping it thin, the trick is to freeze the piece first, then leave in room temperature for 20 minutes, then chop. If you are like me bought ‘ready-to-make’ one, just defrost it.

2) Chop 1 spring onion, a piece of ginger and around 4 garlic gloves into slices.

3) Chop some Chinese leaves into
small pieces. The best part of the chinese leave using for this dish is from 3 or 4 layer inwards, the outside layers are normally good for stir-fry.

4) Boil some water.

Cooking

1) In a heated wok (on strong fire), pour in around 4 tablespoons of oil.

2)When the oil is hot enough, put a tablespoon of sichuan peppercorn (not ground), around 5 anise star and 4/5 pieces of dried red chili (if you like spicy, put more, or you prefer not spicy, put one or none) into the wok, and leave sliced spring onion, ginger and garlic in along with 1 tablespoon of cooking wine.

3) After couple of minutes, until the ‘aromatic smell’ released from anise star and sichuan peppercorn, put the lamb pieces in, stir-fry.

4) Meanwhile, place another (deep) sauce pan on the other fire, when the lamb changes colour (almost done), then transfer everything from the wok to here, and add around just less than 1L of water, allow it boil.

5) Then put in chopped Chinese leaves, a small bunch of Fensi and a handful goji berries.

6) Add in 1 tablespoon of salt (or more).

7) Keep it boiling for around further 5 -8 minutes on low fire, then put the coriander in before take the dish onto a deep plate.

Chinese lamb pot

---------- Et voila!

I like it to have boiled rice, very plain rice, so it will not disturb the taste of the dish. :)) Good to increase your appetite when the weather is like this. :))  But you do need to eat as soon as it is done, otherwise, fensi could soak up all the soup in the plate.