The venerable Lady Otter is headed to the woods for a few weeks, and needs to bring some lamb meatballs with her, as part of a traditional medieval Indian meal she’s making. If she’ll be kind enough to share her recipes when she gets back, I’ll post them up here.
Chickpea pancakes
First, she made chickpea pancake batter by soaking the dried peas in water for a while, then grinding them to a fine paste. She fried up a test pancake, which was really good, even though she still had a bunch of spices to add.
Lamb meatballs
And then, on to the meat, a 5-pound boneless leg of lamb. The guys went up to the Hilltop butcher shop earlier in the day—during the daily monsoon—and scored a really nice hunk.
Unfortunately, the snout of our meat grinder was hopelessly rusted on, and despite a few hours of trying, we couldn’t get it to budge. (We even tried soaking it in a couple of cans of cola, which is an old home remedy for freeing up rusty, stuck things…to no avail.)
If we couldn’t clean it, we couldn’t use it, so we moved on the our backup plan: the food processor. We chunked the lamb up into pieces that the machine wouldn’t choke on.
A few drinks later, and lots and lots of grinding, Lady Otter added a bunch of saffron that she’d been soaking in warm water, and the meat was ready to be turned into meatballs. She still had a lot to do to prepare for her trip, so that’s where we left off for the evening.
Pictured above (from top): A nice juicy leftover lamb steak, homemade sweet cheese for frying in little balls, ground lamb for meatballs, chickpea pancake batter.