Has the Sheep Got Your Goat?

Last updated on: December 2, 2010 at 2:02 pm by Nancy Qualls-Shehata

Has the Sheep Got Your Goat? 2010-12-02T14:02:00-05:00 Nancy Qualls-Shehata

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Bismillahi Rahmani Rahim

Salaam Alaikum wa Rahmatullah.

Okay, congratulations. It’s been a few weeks since Eid and you’ve managed to completely block out of your mind the fact that you have an entire sheep in your downstairs deep freeze. You roasted a leg immediately after the slaughter and sauteed the liver and other internal bits in a lot of onion and garlic to share with friends and family, then the next day you ordered pizza and from then on the family has survived on Eid-party leftovers and poultry. Lots of poultry. Last night your husband turned to you and asked the fateful question: “What happened to the sheep?”

You can’t explain to your Arab / Indo-Pak / African husband that you are accustomed to your meat coming into the house in small, manageable chunks in tightly-wrapped styrofoam trays, rather than a 30-gallon trash bag. You can’t admit to him that you are at a complete loss when it comes to dealing with a hunk of meat the size of your preschooler. You are supposed to be queen of the kitchen, able to whip up dinner for ten last-minute guests in the blink of an eye. “Honey, there are some brothers passing through town on their way to a rugby match. I’ll just bring them home and you can feed them, okay? We’ll be there in twenty minutes, bye!” So, what the heck are you going to do with this beast that still looks disturbingly like it was before it lost its skin?. And God help you if the head is in the sack there somewhere….

I have found that I have a couple of ways to deal with this. First, I donate as much as I can. When you slaughter your Eid offering, you are supposed to give one third of it to a needy family, and one third as a gift. In theory, this would mean you would have no more than a third of a beast to deal with. In reality, you end up with a meat puzzle of mismatched critters because your friends are all gifting YOU with meat faster than you can give yours away. You can just wait until the orgy of giving dies down and then instruct your husband to donate bags of meat to some single brothers because “they need it more than we do”. You can send some to Lady Gaga for her next outfit. Or you can step up to the plate and look that sheep in the eye socket and tell it that it is not going to get the best of you. If you have the courage to take on the challenge, don’t despair. I’ll walk you through it….

Okay, best case scenario is that you had the beast chopped into manageable pieces after it was slaughtered and then those pieces were bagged separately and then frozen. Yeah, right, I’m laughing, too. I have two huge modern-art pieces masquerading as meat in my freezer because I had divided them up, then my husband UN-divided them to make a “better” division of them for donating. Somehow I came out of this with more meat than I started with. Well, anyway, you’ll need to thaw it out somehow. I do the unthinkable and let it thaw at room temperature until it is thawed enough that I can hack or pry pieces off. I keep larger pieces, like the legs, whole for roasting. For the other bits, I find that with sheep or goats there’s a really high bone-to-meat ratio and I need a different technique. Enter the stockpot….

In my largest stockpot, I place as much meat as will comfortably fit. I mix everything up, so there will be ribs, backbone, and some more meaty chunks all in the pot. I cover this with water, toss in a couple of onions, several cloves of garlic, a few beef boullion cubes and spices. My spices are salt, pepper, definitely cumin, and oregano, with some Worcestershire sauce tossed in as well. I bring the pot to a boil and use a big spoon to scoop of the layer of scum that will come to the top of the pot in the first half hour of cooking. Then I lower the heat to medium and let the meat cook for a few hours until the meat is falling off the bone. I strain the whole thing into another bowl or pot so I have a big bowl of broth and the strainer full of the solid stuff. Then I let the meat cool and remove all the meat from the bone, keeping the meat and tossing the bones. Or I let my kids play with them.

Now I cook rice using the meat broth. I prefer Golden Carnilla parboiled long grain rice because I don’t have to rinse or soak it and it gives me nice consistent results and individual grains that don’t glob together. Two cups of rice, four cups of broth, put in pot, boil, turn down heat to medium unitil water is absorbed, turn to low to let it steam out a bit. Then I fluff the rice and add in the meat that I cooked. Sometimes you’ll have more meat than you want to stir back in, depending on how meaty the pieces are that you started with. You can save any extra cooked meat and warm it and slather it with BBQ sauce for a great sandwich. Add various side dishes with this and you will have one happy family. And visiting rugby team.

I hope I was able to help you get over your fear of meat that looks like what it used to be, which is sheep. It tastes really, really good, and those nightmares you’ll have about an eyeless sheep chasing you across a field will fade over time. Or so I’m told.

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