"Kibbeh" Meatballs

I've been away for a while, I went to Japan for vacation and it was fabulous!  Once I raid my local Japanese market, I'm definitely going to try and make some of the amazing food I tried while I was there.  Real ramen! Katsu! Sushi!  Well, maybe not sushi.  From what I hear it's expensive to ride in an ambulance.

But until then, here is a dish that was almost a colossal failure until my husband suggested we turn it into meatballs. It turned out to be a great tasting meal that made enough meatballs for me to freeze some extra.  I topped it with some super easy muhammara sauce and served it with a side of tabbouleh.

The plan was to make this recipe for baked kibbeh.  I don't know if it was because I ground my own lamb (Wegman's was out), if my onions were too watery, or my food processor juiced up on steroids while I was away, but it turned my kibbeh shell mixture into a sticky, runny pile of gloop that was impossible to roll into a uniform sheet and even harder to cut into rounds with a cookie cutter.  As I sat with my lamb gloop in one bowl and my delicious smelling filing in a frying pan and attempted to figure out how exactly I was going to turn it into kibbeh, my husband had an idea.  Why not just stir the filling into the meat disaster and make meatballs?  Brilliant!

Fresh Pasta with Lentils and Caramelized Onions

This is an easy to make vegetarian dish that has very few ingredients!  It can be made with fresh or dried pasta.  I bought some fresh, but the original recipe specifically called for dried.  Part of the theory for using dried pasta is that it cooks in the same pot as the lentils, which should add more lentil flavor.  So, my fresh pasta version is probably less earthy than what the recipe intended.  The first time I made it a few weeks ago, I thought it was a little bland, but that was very easily rectified with a few dashes of Aleppo pepper.  Regular crushed red pepper would work too.  The most important thing for the flavor of this dish is to really let the onions caramelize. 

Baked Falafel and Tabbouleh

I love falafel!  I've always wanted to try making it.  But, I want to avoid frying my food.  Especially with something as addictive as falafel.  A while back, I posted a picture of baked falafel on my Facebook page.  It was my first attempt at making it, and it tasted great despite looking a little rough.  Last night, I made it a second time and it looked much better!  Just for fun, I put the older photo at the bottom of this post for comparison.  Both times I served it with a basic tabbouleh recipe I got from The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, with extra lemon of course.  The small dish of sauce is something I made up.  There's a Lebanese restaurant near my house that serves falafel with a lemony, garlicky tahini sauce.  I attempted to approximate it, and it turned out to be really well!  I'm proud of myself for being able to figure out what the main ingredients were in the sauce and play with the ratios to get something I liked. 

Since the falafel is baked, it's not crunchy on the outside as if it were fried.  It still tastes like falafel however.  The tabbouleh is a very basic recipe, but it's fine just the way it is, except for a little extra lemon.  :) I made a half recipe this time, a full recipe is more than enough to feed 2 people as a side dish.  It kept well in the fridge overnight, I ate the rest for a snack. The tahini sauce is tart and tangy, with a little bit of a salty garlic taste to it.  It's awesome, but I don't know what it would go well with except for falafel.  I didn't measure anything when I made it, but I did my best to approximate it in my recipe below.