Coincidental lamb koftes
On Friday we had already decided that Saturday night would be kofte night and it made me smile this morning to see that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, writing in The Guardian magazine, had a merguez-style kofte recipe. Well, I like merguez too, so this seemed too good an opportunity to miss.
I decided to use his recipe for tonight’s meal, because it looked good, but I didn’t bother with leaving the meat mixture overnight (well, I didn’t actually have the time) and I mixed the sesame seeds into the mixture rather than coating the koftes, because I used my griddle to cook them instead of a frying pan. Also, I didn’t add any poppy seeds. Apart from that, it was pretty much as described in the link, except I bought both minced beef and minced lamb from the butcher and they were sufficiently fatty.
To go with them, I made a red and white cabbage, red onion and grated carrot salad, with a lemon juice and olive oil dressing, some thinly sliced Turkish green peppers dressed with olive oil, salt and cider vinegar, cacik, hummous, a splash of hot chilli sauce from a bottle (Encona is great here) and pitta bread.
They were pretty tasty, but I think that next time I will put the minced meats in a processor to make the mixture a bit more close-textured. I’ll definitely use this recipe again though.
To drink we had a bottle of Hochar Père et Fils 2005, from Majestic, which is the second wine of the famous Lebanese winery, Chateau Musar. This was a fabulous rich wine, made from classic southern French grape varieties and with real depth and fruit. It is lighter than the main wine from the estate but is still a wonderful, mouth-filling red wine that works brilliantly with Middle Eastern and North African flavours.
