Greek Gyros-spiced lamb with pumpkin rice.

Hello all.

It's time for something more traditional.

Greek gyros is meat that has spices infused to it. Usually it's set up on a rotating vertical spit and adjusting the heat from the broiler and the amount of fat in the meat is used to control how juicy the gyro is. It is usually sliced off and placed in pita with tzatziki and salad. It's similar to shawarma and donairs.

In this case, we do not have a rotating spit, so we made gyro cakes out of lamb meat. Foregoing with the tradition though, we had it with some pumpkin rice. Because hey, pumpkins are plentiful here so why not take advantage of their benefits?

And so, here is the recipe!

Ingredients (enough for 2 people, plus seconds)

• 1 kilo lamb minced meat
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1/2 tsp cinammon
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp coriander powder
• 2 tsp parsley powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp oregano

Looks simple, right? The only thing you need to do is to mix the lamb minced meat (or any meat of your choice) with the spices above. And if you think there's another spice that would go, don't be afraid to add it!

Form it into lamb cakes and grill it or fry it. We put it in a skillet on very low fire and let it cook.
That was actually the most time consuming part. The actual cooking time was the worst, because you can smell the delicious gyro cooking but you know it's not done yet.

Pumpkin rice

• 2 cups chopped pumpkin (we used butternut squash)
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1 tbsp soy sauce 
• 1 cup chopped asparagus
• 1 cup red bell pepper - chopped
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1tsp cinammon
• 1tsp grated fresh ginger
• 1 cup rice (your choice - we used basmatti)
• 1/2 water

We put all the ingredients in the slow cooker from the morning and left it to cook 4-5 hours until we ate.
It was really good!!

Give it a try guys!

I'll also post a recipe on how to make some good tzatziki and not that sour cream crap you find in stores.

Let me know what you think :)

Haddock delight.

 This is really simple. Using the leftovers from yesterday's pork dish (aka wine sauce and potatoes and whatever else you may have), we added 4 small haddock fillets in our crock-pot along with some vegetables and tandoori powder. Let it cook for 4-6 hours, turn it on high until it warms up and then back to low.

For the rice, we cooked it (1.5 cups) separately while we lightly fried one red pepper, one yellow pepper and about 10 thin asparagus chopped up.

After frying the vegetables for a minute or two, we mixed 2 tablespoons of soysauce and 1 tablespoon unrefined, raw brown sugar and stirred it together. Add a few tablespoons of the rice into the soy sauce mixture and continue stir-frying until it gets covered well.

Add that soy sauce/rice mixture into the rest of the rice and mix.

That's it, you're done! Take a look at more photos. I hope you enjoyed this, give it a try and let me know what you think :)

Slow-cooked lamb with herbs

                                                                    The end result!

I love lamb. Slow-cooked lamb is one of the most delicious meats for me.
Whenever I eat lamb i consider it a treat, since lamb is so expensive, people can't really
afford to have it too often.

In this case, we are using a crock-pot, which is the best thing ever by the way, but if you
dont have one, you can use a regular pot on the stovetop or put it in clay cookware in the oven and leave it to cook for the day (yes, that's right, it takes long to make!). There are many alternatives,
use what you have.

By the way, a great place to get a slow cooker is from Amazon, for anyone who can't find one in a store close to them!


Let's get to it :)

Ingredients

Spices

• Ginger powder
• bay leaves
• rosemary

• Leg of lamb - boneless. I used an entire leg and whatever is leftover will be used to make wraps tomorrow.
• olive oil
• water
• potatoes

 For the salad

• Kale - two pieces
• 1/4 bunch spinach
• 1 onion
• 1 lemon

                                See how half my plate is full of greens? Gotta love the greens!

Instructions

This is a crock-pot recipe. Do you know what a crock pot is?
Wikipedia has the answer haha Crock-Pot
The gist is that it gives me the freedom to put food the night before, turn it on low, get to bed, wake up next morning, go out, come back and the food will be ready and waiting for me to take it out and eat.
I put the leg of lamb in it, put the ginger powder, bay leaves and rosemary. Rosemary is such a nice spice with lamb, i love it. You could also put thyme, instead of rosemary.
Cut the potatoes and spread the bay leaves in and around them.

 

                                               Here's a photo to see the food being cooked.

As you can see, my crock-pot is small. It's 2.5 Quart crockpot from Walmart.  So the next step is different for each of you. Since my pot is small, i only needed half cup of water to almost cover the food. Dont cover all of the meat because the lamb itself has some water itself that will come out while it's cooking.
All the spices you've put in before will be floating in the water and spread around.
Normally, if you leave it just with water, during the process of cooking, all the spices will float to the top and the taste will not be as strong.
What we did here is drizzle olive oil, just enought to cover the surface of the water. This makes the spices "trapped" in the water underneath, so all the taste will come out and the aroma will be heavenly.

That's it for the meat. Turn it on high until it heats up and then on low for the rest of the night. The food will be ready the next day.

Salad
The salad is really simple. It was prepared 5 minutes before we ate. I washed 2 kale branches (?) and a handful of spinach and chopped them up. Chop up one medium onion and take the fresh juice of one lemon and pour it in the salad.
As a dressing  i just used the lemon juice and a couple spoonfuls of the oil from the crock-pot with cooked lamb (the oil retained the aroma of lamb and the herbs).

The end result is a delicious blend of herbs and spices, with the distinct taste of lamb. It's a healthy meal with the proper amouth of starch, protein and vegetables.

Let me know what you think of it and if you have any suggestions comment below! :)