Lamb Kofta Feast

I made this lamb feast a week ago, as part of my ongoing exploration of Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s cookbook Jerusalem. The recipe is available on the London Telegraph’s  website here.

I was thinking about this feast because it’s Holy Thursday, traditionally for Christians a day of feasting before the fasting of the Triduum. The celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the last Passover meal with Jesus and his disciples, makes me want lamb and spices!

In fact, I made my new favorite thing for dinner tonight, chicken breasts pounded out and rolled around a stuffing of feta, shredded zucchini, onion and red peppers (in this case I used a jar of red peppers I canned last summer that also had leeks and olives in it). I sautéed the zucchini mixture and used the extra to dress up some butterfly pasta. It was more Greek than Middle Eastern. Eh, close enough. It got us finished in time for the liturgies.

But I’ve been meaning to recommend this meal, which I made “for company.” The meatball dish is “Kofta B’siniyah,” a mixture of lamb and beef (veal is recommended, and I used a 2:1 ratio of lamb to beef), that is mixed with all sorts of spices and even chopped pine nuts. In the morning, you mix the meat and shape it into these “torpedo-like fingers.” It makes you feel like you’re Jiro Ono making sushi when you’re shaping them in the palm of your hand. Then you leave them in the fridge all day until you’re ready to cook. You fry them and then finish them in the oven and serve them over this great sauce “the consistency of honey made mostly like hummus with more lemon juice and water, and I also mixed it with Greek yogurt.

The side dish was this amazing cardamom rice that the cookbook pairs with chicken thighs. It’s available at the New York Times website here. I just skipped the chicken and made it on the stove. I love it because it calls for 10 cardamom pods and whole cloves (as well as cinnamon sticks). I’ve never cooked with whole cardamom pods before and boy do they add a great flavor to rice. Also, I warn my guests about their presence, but after cooking 40 minutes, they do soften enough not to interfere with the dish. I was not looking forward to digging out whole cloves and cardamom pods from a rice dish.

This rice dish is supposed to have about a cup of mixed herbs on top, but I only had parsley– I will not pay for fresh herbs.

Finally, because this meal was really light on vegetables, and because I had a bunch, I mixed in a couple handfuls of mung bean sprouts into the rice. Mung sprouts, I’m finding, can be rather strong tasting. They are best thrown into other dishes with some flavor. Although the flavor here is complex, it is light, and the sprouts really worked both in terms of texture and taste. Also, Greek yogurt or more of the tahini sauce are great on this rice.

Both of these recipes are the kind of daunting, with long lists of ingredients down the oversized page. But like Indian food, the list is mostly spice mixtures. I found I read the recipe over and over again, even before I started cooking, but everything came together really quickly and easily. It was a great way to cook some of the local ground lamb I can get at the market and experience some unusual flavors. It felt exotic and fancy, and we ate all of the meatballs that night. Maybe next year this time, I’ll be making it for Holy Thursday.