Coriander Mutton.

For someone who maintains a food/recipe blog, I have to admit that I don't experiment with food too much. I know the flavours I want, I know the type of pulse, meat, or fish I want on a particular day, and I stick with it. What's more, if I'm ever eating out (an event with is decreasing by alarming degrees... I just don't like eating out anymore), I pick a restaurant I frequent, and choose the same thing, unfailingly, each and every time!

So for a stickler for order like me, the recipe 'Coriander Mutton' just sounded weird. 'It looks green!', I thought. Mutton curries should always be nice and fiery red. How else can anyone want their mutton curry? How can anyone else even TRY eating green mutton.

But the recipe (that aired on a Bengali channel one morning at 8.00 am while I was slicing cucumbers for my sandwich breakfast) looked so easy, and the ingredients so simple, that I decided to be a little less rigid and manic and go ahead and try it anyways.

So I did, and am I glad for it. You'll see why too, if you try this at home.

Ingredients:
Mutton - 500 gms, boneless (And by this I mean goat meat, not lamb. Try getting some fatless lean red meat.)
Coriander leaves: One thick bunch
Mint (pudina) leaves: One thick bunch
Onions: 6 to 7, medium
Green chillies: 5-6
Garlic - 8 to 9 cloves
Ginger - Two-inch piece
Tomato - 2 medium, diced
Oil
Coriander seeds
Salt
Water
Juice of a lemon

Method:
Boil the meat with salt until tender. While the meat is boiling, make a paste out of the following:
3-4 onions, coriander leaves, mint leaves, green chillies, garlic, ginger, and lemon juice. Marinate the boiled mutton in this for around an hour. Apart from the boiling that will have made the mutton tender, the lemon juice will also make the meat soft.

In a kadhai, heat oil, and season with coriander seeds. When these begin to spluttter, add chopped onions (the remaining from what you have not made into a paste), and fry until the onion begins to brown. Add tomato pieces to this and fry for some more time. Add marinated mutton and salt to this. Remember to put in all the marinade as well, this is what will make for the gravy. If you want, you can also add the stock in which the mutton was boiled, and not add any extra water at all. Boil this for half an hour more. By this time, the pieces of meat would have begun to come apart in strands. This will tell you that it's done.

This tastes best with naan or roti.