Cheap and Exotic - Spicy Meatballs

Cheap and Exotic

A recent fascination with food from the Middle East has led to some spicy little efforts in the kitchen, one of the most successful last night's lamb and rice meatballs. I had some leftover rice to use up, and was making a meze for our evening meal, so gave it a go via the general principles route rather than following a set recipe.

Starting with a spice mix I ground cumin, pepper, rock salt, and fennel, added some ground chilli pepper and sumac, and when all that was mixed zapped it again with some onion tops. For 500g of minced lamb about 250g of boiled white rice was incorporated, plus the spices and two eggs to bind the lot together.

Formed with wet hands into 12 substantial meatballs, with the oven preheated to 175 Celsius, they needed 35 minutes of cooking. During that time a lot of the lamb fat melted out, and was easily poured off to make us feel virtuous.

The results were nicely spicy without any real heat, and provided us with a protein basis for the meal at £3 for the mince and pennies for the rest (eggs from our own hens).

These meatballs went well with a Greek-style dish of green beans: beans (from the garden) boiled for six minutes then added to a pan where a chopped onion had been sweated before a 37p tin of chopped tomatoes was added, with more sumac and loads of pepper. The pan of beans and toms was left to simmer while the meatballs baked.

The vegetable side of things was finished off with a big pan of chopped courgettes (zucchini) slowly fried in olive oil for ages, stirred regularly to keep from catching, the courgettes bashed with a wooden spoon and salted near the end of cooking, when four cloves of crushed garlic were added and given a minute or two to cook. It looks messy, but tastes great - good on bread too.

Anyone with a garden should have at least one courgette plant: in the shops you pay maybe £2 for a sad pack of three picked days ago. We have I think eight plants on our allotment, at least four different varieties, and from July to (with luck) mid-October will have as many as we can cope with. The different shapes and colours - last night yellow, dark green and the almost grey-green Lebanese - make for bright dishes too.