Dear LPG readers,

As ever, when I thought of somewhere to make my culinary visit to this month, I made my decision with thoughts of an up and coming national celebration but, once I have found a country to feature, their national dish’s ingredients and how accessible they are to us in the UK has to be the next variable to be taken into consideration.  

I have never heard of Plov before but the fact that I recognised all the ingredients had a lot to do with why I decided to go for it this month.  The theory has to be that if you have cooked all the ingredients before, mixing them all up in a slightly different way has to have positive results right?  Wrong.

I was doing all right with the deep frying of the Lamb but it all went a little pear-shaped after that.  I prepared all my ingredients first and I automatically pealed all the garlic cloves only to find that they were supposed to be added whole (luckily I had one left).  I am also not sure if I added the rice at the right time and I found the fact that I was supposed to layer it on top of a cooked saucepan of meat a little worrying.

Then there was the long cooking time coupled with the instruction not to disturb the layers until it was all cooked.  I blame that for leaving my version with carrots that, by the time I dug through the rice layer to see how they were doing, had completely disintegrated.

I think that the tasting left all in agreement that this was not one of my finest attempts at following a recipe so I think I will just put this one down to experience and have another go at a later date.  So while I wish all those from Azerbaijan a sincerely positive celebration, I don’t think that my attempt at one of your national dishes was the best, and my taste testers were unanimous in agreeing with me. 

But with an eye on the future I thought that it might be time for cake and Mozambique have both a very popular cake, and an independence day to offer next month.    My focus has landed on thoughts of a bit of a baking session, so I am going to attempt to make Bolo Polana and I hope that baking skills are better than this month’s disappointment.   

CB, Lewisham 

CB shares this month’s research in preparation for next month’s celebration…

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