I’m going to move on from this book.
The main dish was excellent and interesting. I mostly did my best to follow the directions, given that an Insta-Pot behaves slightly differently than a 1990s pressure cooker.
I made the slightly unusual spice mix, with a lot of components, more or less as per spec. (I had to cheat on the cumin and coriander in that I ran out of seed and had to toast those from already-ground. Shouldn’t be a big deal.)
It was good—I liked the (very big) mix of things in it. Score one for Parsi cooking.
There’s a technical problem with the overall lamb recipe. Namely, it calls for you to throw a bunch of big chunks of potato, ginger, eggplant, squash, etc. into a pressure cooker with lamb. I love this—I hate having to fine mince or cut everything for stews. The goal is to yield a fantastically tasty vegetable mash made with water rather than a meat broth (vegan-friendly) which is a great goal. But if you’re doing it with lamb, the lamb is supposed to be set aside after the first cook and then you puree the rest. This is kind of difficult when they’re cooked together. I’d almost argue for putting a whole butterflied leg (or some 1 1/2 lb. thereof) in the Insta-Pot at the bottom and then chopping it into edible pieces after the main cook rather than painstakingly separating the lamb pieces from what’s supposed to get pureed.
The taste was good, though, and it felt different. The real problem for me was the parathas. I made them exactly as per recipe except for substituting spelt flour for whole wheat durum and they were, I have to say, terrible.
They didn’t taste awful, they just weren’t nice breads that you could dip in cucumber-chili raita in any kind of meaningful way. They were just wrong at some basic level that really is the recipe and not me (I’m sure of it).
This has been my issue with the book underneath the “1,000 recipes and nothing’s on” problem—some of the recipes just don’t seem tested or workable. And a lot of those involve baking or frying—the book is a lot better when it comes to stews or grilling. (But what isn’t, on some level?) I just don’t feel like this is a cookbook that engages me or that I can count on—it needs to go into the discard pile for someone else to use.