O Curry, My Curry

Stir-fried Noodles with Singapore Lamb CurryI arrived home yesterday to find Marc at work in the kitchen on supper. It was a book-club-meeting weekend and technically, I should still have been full from the exceeding large amount of brunch consumed just hours earlier. However, I was prepared to rally my courage for a new and delicious meal. (In my family, if you feel full, you're not done yet. I learned early to eat every meal as though I would never see food again. ) At any rate, it turns out that the dinner preparations were not for me, but for his Mom who was due to arrive shortly and who officially warranted the dinner-making. Luckily, it makes no difference to me in whose honour a meal was planned or prepared so long as I get to partake. Plus, I had some champagne from the weekend that miraculously made it through the bookclub unscathed (if only for the fact that the "ladies" were already too hungover to consider Mimosas in the morning) and that was set to compliment the curry quite well. Both Marc and I rapaciously devoured both our first and second helpings in the time it took Shirley to eat one little bowl, due to the chopstick factor. She was determined, though, and in the end (thanks to the stab-a-noodle technique), she won. It is marvelous what curry does to lamb. What is it that makes them so remarkably compatible? Same grandparents? A shared fondness for India? Perhaps it has to do with the lamb we buy; it comes boneless from the butcher (Second To None Meats on 4th St & 21Ave SW) and is locally raised. In fact, it costs less than chicken though it does involve some removal of silverskin - America's Test Kitchen taught us how to do that properly. Sliced up thin and cooked semi-rare, it slides right up to the noodles without hesitation and brazenly demands their cooperation. And the noodles, Lord love 'em, are suckers for a saucy lamb dressed in spices.