Dear LPG, 

When I chose Qatar’s Chicken Machboos as the dish to attempt this month, I had no idea about the football connotations.  Sadly, while I have an interest in that subject, I am one of those England supporters that are willing to learn the outcome of such sport from the news headlines the day after, rather than sitting through every detail.  I have to admit that my thinking was to make a dish that would be fairly straight forward and warming in the middle of this month and I chose the day of 2022’s first snow flurry to do it.

When choosing, I took one look at the picture and thought it looked to be a relatively easy dish to prepare.  There were lots of spices and also quite a bit of marinating time involved but I really became a little worried at the thought of boiling as a way of dealing with the chicken.  The browning process came later, but I think that I boiled it all for a little too long because the drumsticks fell apart in the frying pan.  

I have to say that I deviated from the instruction to discard all the sieved residue left after using the liquid for cooking the rice.  I felt that was a stock worth keeping so it is in the freezer waiting for its moment to shine.  

I had problems sourcing Curd and made my own in the end only to work out that I might as well have used some ordinary Greek yogurt.   I have often added fruit to yogurt, but I was also a bit worried about adding herbs, tomatoes, and onions instead when it came to the sauce, but I followed all the instructions and even used a bit of frozen mint I found under the snow in the garden.   

When it came to the tasting; we decided that it was quite a dry dish lacking in gravy until we added the yogurtlike ‘Raita’ sauce, but that turned out to be the perfect accompaniment to the meal.  We all enjoyed the dish very much although my son was very upset to learn that it came from the very place where England again failed to make the football final. 

But upwards and onwards from football to ballet.  January 26th is Australia day, and a bit of research shows that roast lamb comes pretty close to being their most celebrated dish, but we all know how to do that (?).  So, by way of variation, I have decided to try something that is arguably Australian and a celebration of the great ballerina, Anna Pavlova who was Russian just to confuse things a bit…  

CB Lewisham 

CB has a few recipes to offer for next month…

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