Cook Book Club: April

Thistles and Kiwis,

For this month’s cook book club we turn to Greece. I have only ever been to Athens and Thessaloniki airports (many years ago on my way to Australia when I still lived in Scotland), so I cannot talk about Greek cuisine with any expertise, other than I have had some very good food at Greek places in Melbourne. Anyway, I was lucky enough to find a copy of Georgina Hayden’s Greekish in our local library, the title of which comes from the author’s Greek Cypriot heritage and aims to show straightforward and simple dishes using some of her favourite ingredients.

After a good read through, I decided on the little lamb meatballs with chickpeas as 1) we love meatballs 2) I am trying to incorporate more pulses into my meals and 3) it sounded like something we would both like.

The first thing that struck me was that the quantities seemed a bit odd – 3 red onions? One for the meatballs and 2 for the sauce? Maybe her red onions are smaller than the ones in my kitchen. Second, she says 2 tins of chickpeas to 500g of lamb mince which seemed quite a lot. Anyway, these things can be easily adjusted to taste.

The recipe itself was also a bit odd. First of all, all the meatball ingredients were all mixed together in a food processor – not sure why this was necessary given the main ingredients were mince and breadcrumbs. I just finely chopped the mint leaves, grated half a big red onion and a couple of cloves of garlic, the lemon rind, then added the mince, paprika and breadcrumbs and mixed by hand as I would usually do. After all, it was a pretty standard mixture, just with different seasoning.

The cooking method was also odd – normally I would brown the meatballs, remove from the pan, make the sauce, adding the meatballs back in to finish cooking. This recipe cooked the meatballs, adding in the onion to the pan, then making the rest of the sauce, which seemed a bit odd. The sauce itself was also nothing special – onion, tomato purée and stock with mint at the end. I confess to cooking the meatballs as I would normally, adding the chickpeas before the addition of the partially cooked meatballs, and allowing the whole dish to come together.

I served the finished dish with a big salad and a bulgur wheat based dish. Verdict? Tasty, but nothing outstanding. Do again? Maybe. Would I buy the book? Of course it is extremely unfair to judge a book by one recipe, but no.

Thistles and Kiwis is a Wellington, New Zealand based blog written by Barbara, who likes cats, summer, good food and pretends to garden.

You can find Thistles and Kiwis on Facebook, and also on Instagram @thistlesandkiwis.

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Published by Thistles and Kiwis

Loves summer, sunshine and cats. Beginner gardener, likes eating, cooking and reading about food

29 Comments

  1. yes it makes you wonder sometimes why cookbooks have such oddities, and end up with fairly blaagh dishes at the end. I often find that a cook will put out a book and fancy it up in technique etc unnecessarily. I do love a meatball tho! and we eat a lot of chickpeas in our house 🙂

    sherry https://sherryspickings.blogspot.com/

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    1. I think sometimes the original recipe was for eg 20 people and it then gets reduced to be for 6 and things go all over the place. I agree about the overly fancy technique too.

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    2. It sounds like an interesting culinary adventure, even if the recipe didn’t quite hit the mark! Sometimes, tweaking recipes to suit your own style and taste can make all the difference, as you did with the meatballs. It’s always fun to explore new cookbooks, even if they don’t all become favorites. Plus, pairing the dish with a salad and bulgur wheat sounds like a lovely, balanced meal!

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  3. I love your take on this recipe! Cooking for two requires some ingenuity and is not only a matter of halving a recipe (or whatever) for some ingredients simply do not fit into such niceties. I often cut down on quantities (e.g. why use two tins of tomatoes when one is clearly enough?) and so work by ‘sight’ and ‘gut feel’. Your recipe reviews are always fun to read.

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  8. Three onions does sound like too much. Sounds like your instinct to make changes worked out well. When I was studying food science and nutrition at university, our professor encouraged use to switch things up, and even create our own recipes. It sounds like you’re an experienced cook, so this would work well for you.

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  10. It does sound an odd recipe. I would have thought using a food processor would only make sense if you were combining the mince and chickpeas prior to making the meatballs, and one tin would have been enough. Looks tasty though.

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  11. Too many chickpeas (they wreak havoc with my digestive system!). But the whole point of other people’s recipes, in my view, is to use the as an inspiration rather than a set of instructions to be followed slavishly, so maybe there something here that can be adapted?

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  12. That all seems very off indeed – and not worth the palaver… I’m going back for a read of this one as I too was keen to make it. Thanks for linking up…

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    1. You can easily change the instructions and just use the ingredients/idea. I really enjoy this challenge and am already lining up a few books to think about for next month.

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