You Screw Things Up Enough, It’s Bound To Go Right

I had been thinking about the almost baked pate-kebabs from lamb we made the other day so when we were at the store the other day I picked up a pack of meatloaf mix (pork, veal, beef), which obviously isn’t lamb but which I figured might work anyway. Conceptually, it was something along the lines of “South Asian Meatloaf Ke-balls.”

So today I pull out the copy of At Home With Madhur Jaffrey and opened it to what I thought was the recipe I mangled and after I prepped the paste that the meat gets mixed into I realized that I was using the wrong recipe. I had the book open to the Lamb Kebabs with Mint recipe (page 116) and had dutifully measured out all the requisite cumin, coriander, cayenne and ginger and was going to mix it into the ground meat when I noticed it said “Mix well and prob the lamb cubes with a fork.” Hrm. It took me a while to figure out what the original recipe was, and only after referring back to this post was I able to reconstruct what happened — which is why I want to get this down in the first place.

One thing I changed was switching out plain yogurt for ricotta cheese, which we always have around. So: Ricotta cheese, lemon juice, salt cayenne pepper, ground cumin, ground coriander, two scallions (in place of an onion), ginger, the meat, and skip the mint but add the butcher parsley they always include in the meatloaf. Who eats that stuff? you might ask. We did. Tonight. It actually came in handy.

And then I turned the page to the actual recipe I mangled before which was when everything collapsed into itself. The only remaining issue was how long to cook the balls. The answer, I now Googled my way into, was 400 degrees for about 30-35 minutes.

The second part of the meal were the sous vide carrots (you know, those things), except this time I experimented with adding mushrooms. That part worked, too. Also, we used ghee instead of butter.