A new method for biryani

Last night I'd bought lamb for a curry with the intention of looking through recipe books and deciding exactly what kind of a curry it should be when I got home. I hadn't been anticipating not getting home until eight o'clock, though; by that point I was tired and didn't feel up to complicated cooking, so decided that I'd go for simplicity and make a lamb biryani.

I make biryanis quite a lot, either vegetable or chicken, generally following the recipe for vegetable biryani in Vicky Bhogal's Cooking Like Mummyji where the vegetables (and meat, if I'm making a chicken biryani) are cooked with spices, tomatoes and yoghurt and then layered with almost-cooked rice and baked briefly. I wasn't sure about using this method for the lamb, though, as it was obviously going to need a lot more cooking than chicken would; in the end I opted for a recipe from a very old Indian Cooking book of the kind that you used to find in supermarkets back before the Net Book Agreement disappeared and supermarkets started selling the same books as everywhere else. I'm not quite sure where it came from; certainly, neither of us bought it or remembers owning it individually, so we think it must either have been left by a previous tenant somewhere or belonged to a former housemate.

This recipe used a different technique; I fried an onion until golden brown, added ginger, garlic and whole spices (cinnamon, bay, cardamom, cloves) and then stirred in the lamb, some vegetables (peas and carrots), ground spices and yoghurt, topped it with partly-cooked rice and baked it for an hour.

It turned out very well; at least as nice as the biryani we usually have, if not better. The recipe wasn't brilliant (it showed its age in such things as calling for either ginger paste or ground ginger, and garlic paste or powder, because not so long ago fresh ginger and garlic weren't things people necessarily had in their houses, and using chilli powder where I think a fresh chilli might have worked better), but I'd definitely use the technique again.