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Lamb shoulder cubes simmer slow with chickpeas, lentils, tomatoes, vermicelli noodles, and a heavy spice mix (ginger, cinnamon, turmeric, cumin) in a generous broth. The soup is finished by adding the noodles in the last 10 minutes and a final scatter of fresh coriander, parsley and lemon juice.
A Chilean lentil stew, the kind of one-pot that turns up at any Sunday lunch through autumn and winter. You render smoked bacon in a heavy pot until the fat runs clear, then soften onion, garlic and carrot in the rendered bacon fat. Tomato and a generous scatter of dried oregano build the base. Green or brown lentils go in with stock and simmer for forty-five minutes until tender. Potato chunks join for the last twenty minutes. A splash of red wine vinegar at the end brightens the whole stew and pushes it from heavy to balanced. Eaten with crusty bread, a chopped salad on the side, and a glass of red.
Mantu are the steamed lamb dumplings that Afghanistan shares with the rest of Central Asia, plated under garlic yogurt and topped with a thick split-pea-and-tomato sauce. The filling is straightforward: lamb mince fried with onion and spices, then cooled completely before it goes into the wrappers (warm filling makes the dough soggy). A plain flour-and-water dough rolls thin, gets cut into 8 cm squares, and each square gets a teaspoon of filling pinched closed at all four corners. Steam for twenty minutes. While they are steaming you whisk the chaka (yogurt with garlic and salt) and cook a quick qorma of yellow split peas with tomato and dried mint. Plate stacked: yogurt under, mantu in the middle, qorma over the top, dried mint and a sprinkle of chilli powder to finish. A whole platter goes to the centre of the table to share.
This is the small-plate version of mantu, folded into a four-pointed flower with the meat visible at the top, plated for a starter or a shared snack rather than the full main-course platter. The filling is ground lamb with grated onion (squeezed dry first, otherwise the parcel goes soggy), garlic, ground coriander, cumin, cinnamon, salt and pepper. The fold is the interesting bit. Take a wonton wrapper, drop a teaspoon of filling in the centre, pull all four corners up over the centre, and pinch them together in pairs to make an X-shape with four small triangles of meat showing at the top, like an opened flower. Steam in a bamboo basket eighteen to twenty minutes over boiling water. Two sauces alongside: a chana-dal-tomato-and-mint sauce stewed thick, and chaka yogurt with garlic. Plate as you would aushak: yogurt base, dumplings on top, lentil-tomato sauce ladled across, dried mint scattered last.