Last Night's Dinner 31

A harira style stew with additions including recipes for PERFECT buttery, chicken stock infused rice and pressure roast vegetables. Plus a cathartic moan.

Welcome everyone! There have been a fair few new subscribers again recently so before I get into the post proper, just a reminder to you all that if you are new to pressure cooking, or pressure cooker curious, all my earlier posts - which are completely free for everyone to read - will give you all the basics, including how to choose a pressure cooker, how to get started once you’ve got one as well as more technical things you may see mentioned in this post such as deglazing and the types of ways to release pressure.

Most of my Last Night’s Dinner posts have paywalls for my paid subscribers, who in this instance get to see the method for the harira plus the full recipes for the rice and and vegetables. Becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to all my recipes, but there is plenty in every post for free subscribers too. My next post will be a free one and will be a guide to pressure roasting peppers along with several recipes/ideas for using them. Onto today’s recipe….

This is NOT how your harira should look. This is Adam adding a ton of rice and mixing it all up

A classic harira is usually an all in one affair - the sort of thing cooked when you want comfort food in summer and much soupier than shown above. It’s a spiced, tomato based stew with chickpeas, red peppers, often rice or vermicelli and if meat is added it is usually lamb or chicken. Easy and one pot. And you can make it the one pot way if you like, I will include the instructions below.

But because my household is tricksy I have to separate out the carbs. As I think I mentioned just last week, Adam needs ALL THE CARBS. Shariq will not eat white carbs unless they are prebiotic/resistance and not at all in the evening. I want the carbs, but in a much lesser quantity. Yes, I can just pile flatbreads on the table and often do, but Adam loves rice (so do I).

So last night I cooked the harira without the rice, cooked separately what I think was the best buttery, chicken stock infused rice I have ever made - literally perfect - and then pressure roasted cauliflower and broccoli too. The advantage of making 3 dishes is that I have plenty of leftover rice and vegetables which will form parts of other meals. Keeping them separate gives me more flexibility when meal planning.

And yes, three dishes instead of one does create a bit more washing up. I don’t do this lightly - our third dishwasher in 12 years, after performing erratically and mainly poorly for the past few months, is now beyond redemption and we are back to handwashing everything. This is supposed to be temporary but may become permanent. Partly because I just cannot be faffed with the effort it takes to decide on a new dishwasher, partly because the thought of the unloading makes me feel tired. Partly because I could do with the extra storage space. But will also depend on how well I manage to train the rest of the household into doing the washing up properly.

I quite like washing up and when it is just me, a full sink and Jack and Stephen on audio (more on them another time). It feels less exhausting than unloading the dishwasher, especially if you are having to check every item because it isn’t washing properly. Also, for the first time in years, I have the energy for it, post dinner. I’m even sweeping the kitchen floor every night too. This would have been impossible to even contemplate just a few months ago.

However, I don’t want to do it all - of course I don’t like it when I come to cook and there is a load to be done as no one has cleared up after themselves. But my teens (and actually, Shariq too) are resistant to doing it properly. Weaponised incompetence has nothing on them. SO MANY ISSUES. The main one is I cannot get them to wash and rinse in hot enough water because their poor fragile hands can’t stand it - I have bought rubber gloves in every size to no avail because they don’t want to wear them. So everything is greasy and sudsy. And often still dirty too. Tea and coffee rings on teaspoons, oats from muesli sticking to the rim of bowls, egg yolk welded to plates, slicks of oil and butter on everything. The kids are just slapdash but with Shariq it is because he doesn’t wear his glasses so misses how dirty everything is. Can I persuade him to wear his glasses? No, I cannot.

They never wash up everything. They never dry everything. They flood the work surface around the sink - the pooled water has been known to travel a good metre and a half to the edge of the unit before running, in an actual torrent down the side, taking any worksurface detritus with it. And they leave it! I refuse to believe they don’t see it. I am sure they deliberately ignore it. It means I can’t just relax, knowing the kitchen is being cleared properly - I have had to train myself not to hover, all anxious, irritating myself and everyone else, but sneak back in afterwards and finish off to my own standard. I am driving myself - and them - crazy.

An example of the way their minds work. I usually wash up as I go and definitely try to have everything as clear as possible before we eat dinner. Last night was an exception - Adam came home after 3 hours of after school rehearsals and was ravenous, so we ate earlier than usual. There were a few things in the sink and the draining board was full. I went to wash up after dinner and the bowls and cutlery Shariq and I had used were nowhere to be seen. Where are they? I asked. Washed, dried and put away, was the reply. He had left everything else.

The summer holidays are imminent and I swear that by the end of them Adam will be washing up and cleaning the kitchen to my standard. Hold me to this, I am determined because despite all of this I do not want to go back to a dishwasher.

NOTE - I was writing this at 4 am this morning (yes, one of those nights) and when I took a break and checked the Substack app I realised that just last night, my friend Deb had also written about washing up but with guests in the house and she does it MUCH more entertainingly than I do (damn her!) so you should have a read and also admire the beautiful dinner set she has just bought. Plus subscribe while you are at it as her posts are always lovely:

The delegation struggle is real

Harira

This is based on the recipe in The Pressure Cooker Cookbook, which in turn is based on a recipe I used to cook a lot by The Two Fat Ladies (remember them?) They do not give provenance, just say that it is “Middle Eastern, somewhat peasant.” I would argue it is more North African, particularly Moroccan, where it is an all year round comfort food but especially popular during Ramadan to break fast. It is one of those dishes which is beloved of Muslim and Jewish people, often used to break fast at Yom Kippur too, where sometimes it is served with shots of fig liqueur.

There are of course many variations. Some are thickened with egg or a flour and water mixture, to get that classic Greek avgolemono silkiness. Mine doesn’t include either - if I have added red lentils and/or rice they do a fine job of thickening because of the starch they give out. And although I love using egg as a thickener, it is not a very practical thing to do if you know you are going to have leftovers as it makes it much harder to reheat properly - the egg will curdle if the soup boils.

Additions - I quite like adding the sweetness of fresh apricots at the end - I will simmer in with the red peppers. Figs are a traditional accompaniment. Some recipes incorporate everything from olives, to harissa paste, to preserved lemons. I like my simpler version.

How to make this truly one pot with the rice. This is not completely straightforward. My recipe includes red lentils which disintegrate and therefore thicken the dish - if you want to add rice as well, you have to do a second pressure cook (otherwise you will overcook the rice), in which case you need to make sure you don’t add the lentils along with the chickpeas, but add them for the second cook instead. The reason for this is that if you include them in the first cook, they will disintegrate and their starch will sink through the liquid to the base. This means that when you try to bring your cooker up to pressure again, they will likely burn and perhaps stop the cooker from reaching pressure. You can mitigate this with extra liquid, but best to be on the safe side.

1 tbsp olive oil

15g butter

1 onion, diced

2 celery sticks, diced

400g lamb (neck fillet, shoulder, leg or a combination), diced (around 2cm)

4 garlic cloves, finely chopped or grated

1 tsp each ground ginger, cumin, coriander, dried mint

1/2 tsp each turmeric, ground cinnamon

25g red lentils, rinsed

25g green lentils, rinsed

250g cooked chickpeas

400g chopped tomatoes, fresh or tinned

750ml chicken, lamb or vegetable stock (you could get away with water)

A generous pinch of saffron, soaked in a little warm water

2 roast red peppers, pulled into strips

juice of 1 lemon, to taste

1 tsp honey, or to taste

A few sprigs parsley or coriander or both, finely chopped, to serve

Optional extra: 50g basmati rice, well rinsed. If adding this, increase the amount of stock to 1 litre