It doesn’t have to be snowing to be blowing wet and nasty weather out there. Today was a good day to pull together the root vegetables from the farmers markets and make one of my favorite stews, Shurpa Lagman. It’s kind of hard to go wrong when you start out with a little beef, and add onion, turnips, rutabaga, parsnips and carrots. Something special happens with the flavors of tomato, cumin, chili flakes, and coriander meld. What I love best about this dish are the nutty globes of chickpeas generously dotting the bowl. So good, and so good for you.
Writing Every Day 
Lagman is one of the traditional dishes in Kyrgyzstan, made with mutton, veggies, and pulled noodles. It’s the Kyrgyz version of lomein and we ate it all through our 3 week trip in central asia a few years ago. I wish I could learn how to pull noodles!
Hand-pulled noodles, oh yeah! The closest I’ve got is the bag of fresh noodles from Chinatown to be cooked up when we reheat and eat some of the Shurpa.
I think the recipe I base mine on came to the NYTimes via Russia, thus the beef instead of mutton. One of these days, I’ll remember to try it with lamb.
There’s some amazing youtube videos of a guy pulling noodles and it looks like a magic trick. 🙂
Yeah, you can tell they’re experts because they make it look so easy.