Rendang Curried Lamb Shanks (by G)

On Saturday Biggs and I were watching... well... it's probably best I don't divulge exactly what crap we were watching on Saturday, needless to say (despite the show's crappiness), I was inspired to drop my original idea for dinner and go in another direction.

I'm a curry fan, and a lamb shank fan but for some reason it had never occurred to me to combine those two things before. I don't know how authentic this rending curry is - it is a mix of brown onion, shallot, garlic, ginger, red chilli and coriander. After chopping those things up I blitzed them with the stick blender to make a paste then fried it off - oh, I also added some belechan (toasted shrimp paste) and lemon zest. I also added some coriander seed and cumin seed that I had toasted in the pan and hand ground in the mortar and pestle (also some turmeric that I had shook from a jar). I had already browned the shanks, so once the paste had lost it's rawness I added them to the pan along with some coconut milk and beef stock and some bay leaves and a cinnamon stick and simmered the whole lot for about 4 hours.  After 4 hours I realised I had meant to take the bay leaves and cinnamon stick out earlier to avoid their flavour overpowering everything else. A quick taste test confirmed that the curry was unsuitably bitter. After consulting the internet I discovered that to counter bitterness you just need to add salt, or perhaps acid - I did both. Salt in the form of fish sauce and lemon juice for acid. Surprisingly that fixed the bitterness problem right up.

Anyway, by that point the shanks were pretty much done so I put them in a low oven and reduced the sauce - for some reason I split the sauce in to two batches at the end - one of them I boiled some baby potatoes in (because I had them) the other I reduced some more then added the leftover coriander.  The former sauce went under the shank on the plate and the latter on top of the shank. It was all a bit superfluous because I then covered the whole thing in crushed pistachio nuts (they were going to be a substitute for toasted coconut that was supposed to go in the sauce to thicken it - I'm not a huge fan of coconut. In the end I thought the nuts would make the sauce weirdly grainy so I sprinkled them on top).

I think, on reflection, the meal was a bit too salty but it was savoury and basically warm so it pretty much did the job.