This is a wonderful recipe that takes me back to my childhood. My father would make this dish for special occasions, such as Arbor Day, or, interestingly enough, on Nooruz, which is the Kyrgyzstan celebration of New Year that is actually commemorated in the spring. Despite the fact that he had never visited Kyrgyzstan, or had any ties whatsoever—ethnic or platonic—to this landlocked Central Asian country, my father fashioned himself as quite the Krygyz-ophile.

He once even went so far as to befriend a traveling group of Uyghur circus performers, who sponsored his admittance into their homeland in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China with the intention of leading him on a cross-border incursion into greater Kyrgyzstan (this was at the height of the Cold War). Unfortunately, while navigating the highland border crossing, a mule ate some of the psychedelic peyote buttons smuggled back by one of the Uyghur guides (scored during a night of reveling in Bisbee, AZ) and ended up killing half the expedition in a mad rampage.

My father’s life was spared when, in a fit of desperation, he frantically grasped at and accidentally—in a mad flailing—impaled the crazed beast with the dagger end of a kefta kebab skewer. The trip was cut short as the surviving members returned to base camp in order to properly lionize my father with song and fermented yak spittle. Then the Chinese Red Communists came in and imprisoned my father against his will, details of which I will not go into as they were documented in the 1997 movie Red Corner (starring Richard Gere), which is based loosely on my father’s travails.

Nooruz Dumplings (or Arbor Day Stew, or National Heroes’ Day Fricassée, or Administrative Professional’s Day Ragoût)

1. Construct a lanyard from girded twine reinforced with titanium filaments.
2. To this attach a bulb of elephant garlic using ordinary helicopter cabling hooks, and loop around your neck.
3. Extract exactly 43 seeds from a dozen (or so) preserved Moroccan lemons.
4. Using a vernier micrometer (in a pinch, a digital caliper will suffice), extract the top .002 millimetre sheath from each seed using your best carbide-based honing stone. Bless with elephant garlic by waving the lanyard exactly 2 cm above in exactly 7 counter-clockwise concentric circles (progressively diminishing in size, you may choose to honor the Golden Ratio…your call). Set aside.
5. Meanwhile, in a large stockpot, pour 2573 milliliters of witchhazel stock over one free-range ham hock and the hoof of a middle-aged albino alpaca, and bring to a rapid boil.
6. Add 2 tablespoons of tincture of wort (recipe to follow), stir, and lower to a low simmer.
7. Bless the stock with garlic lanyard, this time maintaining a 5 cm seperation cushion, doubling the number of concentric circles (again, the Golden Ratio comes highly recommended), but this time use clockwise rotations, except on the very last (14th) rotation.
8. Light an incense.
9. In a non-stick 12-inch sautee pan, bring 2 tablespoons non-GMO rapeseed oil to smoking point over high temperature. Sear 8 ounces of lean, cubed Virginia Oppossum tenderloin (that has been sprinkled with Tamil peppercorns and Gibraltan sea salt) for 1 minute. Then take the garlic lanyard, smash against your forehead with a force strong enough to maim a small child, and then add to pan with lemon seed shavings and one gingko nut. Stir-fry until the papery garlic skins become translucent.
10. Hermetically seal these ingredients with your favorite brand of high barrier plastic, and place inside a thermal immersion circulator and allow to cook sous vide at exactly 185 degrees Farenheight for a fortnight.
11. When the meat has been cooked, plate in a shallow dish, top with a ladle of stock, and garnish with a dollop of wort tincture (recipe to follow).

Tincture of wort

• 3 kilos assorted wort, including but not exlusive to Adderwort (aka Snakeweed), Blue Navelwort, Bullock’s or Cow’s Lungwort, Golden Ragwort, Laserwort, Mallowwort, or Sea Milkwort. However, I would advise against using Hemlock Dropwort, which imparts a slight bitterness that is not very pleasing to the palate.
• 1123 milliliters of common bog liquid
• 5346 milliliters desalinized North Sea water
• One nutmeg berry
• One tablespoon Brewer’s yeast

Bring all the ingredients to a boil in a pressure cooker, and cook for one hour. Decant the liquid using Spanish Moss as the filtering medium, then wash the residue, puree, and set aside. Reduce the liquid by 1/2, add 1/2 teaspoon of agar agar, pureed residue, and 1/8 a thimble of sodium sulphate. Stir well and salt to taste. Mixture with thicken as it stands.