March 02, 2006

Mediterranean mince beefs

Today I felt like cooking for the first time in days and to celebrate this I made an old favourite of mine, "Mediterranean" mince beefs in tomato sauce. Very easy to prepare, and very reviving with strong colours and lots of flavour. I guess you can find similar recipes almost everywhere but this is my version. I like it because it is not impossible to pull off even if you have had a hard day at work...

Serves 3-4
400 g lamb mince, you can use other mince if you don´t like lamb
2 schalotts or half yellow onion, very finely chopped
optional 1 very finely chopped garlic clove
1 egg
good pinch of salt and freshly ground black pepper
some dried or fresh herb, today I used dried mint
50 g fetta cheese

1 packet of crushed tomato or peeled and roughly chopped fresh tomato
optional some more chopped onion, I never use it because I have to go easy on onion when I am cooking for A, whose stomach doesn´t agree with this veg...
salt, pepper and a pinch of sugar
more herbs, today I used a big bunch of fresh parsley, roughly chopped

Mix the mince with the onion, egg and spice. Shape it into six rather big, flat balls and dig in some fetta cheese in the middle.
Brown the beefs some at a time in oil or butter and put aside. I just do this for the colour, they aren´t to be done! Fry the onion for the sauce if you want onion, add the tomato and spice. Put in the beefs, put a lid on the frying pan if you have one and let te beefs cook in the sauce for about 10 minutes until cooked through. Add a little water if the sauce gets too thick. Spice to taste with salt and pepper and serve with rice, quinoa or maybe potato wedges.
An idea I got today but didn´t try out is to add some chickpeas in the sauce, to make it more filling - maybe I´ll try it next time instead.

3 comments:

Pille said...

No picture:( I love meatballs with feta cheese, will definitely try your version of them. I'm intrigued by the shallots/lemon substitution - have you tried both ways? How different is the flavour?

Clivia said...

but oh my, I must have been asleep writing that. It should be yellow ONION. But why not? A chopped lemon would maybe be too soggy, but dried powdered citrus zest or maybe candied peel (maybe too sweet - but you´ll never know, there are quite a few sweet fruits that go well with lamb) could really be nice in these beefs. I will try it out and report back... And now I am going to change the word that went wrong. Sorry!

Pille said...

That's okey, dear Clivia:) I thought it was a bit unusual, but then there are lots of unusual food combinations out there;)
On the second thought, I think I'll stick to the onion as opposed to lemon in this case..