Tonight I made Cumin Lamb from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook.

Lamb is not something I cook often, but our local “international farmer’s market” has a whole stall for lamb, so I was able to pick up a boneless lamb leg pretty easily (if not inexpensively). I have two pounds leftover that I’ll probably end up roasting.

The prep was straightforward, but involved making a spice paste which hasn’t been common so far in the cookbook. I’m used to it with Thai cooking, though. The recipe calls for toasting cumin seeds, Sichuan peppercorns, and small dried chilies, then grinding the cumin seeds and Sichuan peppercorn in a mortar and pestle, then adding garlic and making a paste out of that. It occurred to me while trying to incorporate the garlic that I’d expect to do it in reverse for Thai food: pulverize the garlic then add the ground dry ingredients. The garlic chunks just didn’t want to break down in the sea of ground cumin. I don’t think it affected the end result, though.

The stir fry involved onion, celery, and cilantro in addition to the marinated lamb.

My wife and I both noticed the numbing sensation from the Sichuan peppercorns, but there wasn’t any noticeable heat to the dish from the dried chilies. I wasn’t wild about the cumin-Sichuan peppercorn flavor combination, and I’m not used to the Sichuan “numbing” without the Sichuan “hot;” perhaps I would have liked it better with some more heat. My wife said that it wasn’t her favorite meal from the book. My daughter tried a small bite and said that she liked it but didn’t eat anymore. My son said the meat was “chewy” and …the flavor is weird”. So not a win-win-win-win for our family.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.