Spiced Lamb Meatballs

This weekend's cooking plan held great promise. There was going to be cake, and meatballs, and marinated feta, and slow-roasted tomatoes.

I knew I was submitting this month's recipe to the 14 Foodies blog: Grapefruit Cake
And had a meal plan to go with it, also all from Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home. However, I realized too late that Tom's recipe for lamb meatballs called for cured lemons. Not exactly the type of time I had.

In our house, if you say there will be meatballs for dinner, you can't back out of the plan. Nothing else will do at that point. So in search of plan B, I came across The Kitchn's recipe for Spiced Lamb Meatballs. While trying to choose between meatball recipes, it was the garam masala and ginger in this particular recipe that piqued my interest.

Plan back on track. (Well mostly, because we switched out the feta for a cucumber salad, to better balance with the new meatball recipe's ingredients.)

There are only two of us, so I cut the recipe to 2/3 of the original (roughly). And made a few minor adjustments, most notably to the cooking method.

Spiced Lamb Meatballs

*makes approximately 35 small meatballs (1.5 inch diameter)
1 pound ground lamb
1 pound lean ground beef (I used 90/10)
1 large onion, very finely diced
1 3-inch piece fresh ginger root, peeled and finely grated (I put about 1.5 Tbsp in the meat mixture)
5 garlic cloves, finely diced (or crushed, but my preference is to just dice them)
2 teaspoons salt
2/3 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2/3 teaspoon chile powder
1 2/3 tablespoons garam masala
2 tablespoons finely chopped cilantro
2 tablespoons ground almonds
2 eggs, beaten
1/3 cup flour

(I really hesitated about the flour. I wasn't sure about including it. In fact, I was this close to substituting fresh breadcrumbs, but decided to give it a whirl. Although these came out perfectly, I'd still consider a switch next time. There is just something kind of weird about adding flour to meatballs.)

Combine everything together. (The original recipe says to mix the meats first, and then add the rest of the ingredients - but I ignored this).

Instead of baking these in the oven, like the original recipe calls for, we decided to grill the meatballs. The major deciding factor in this change was that we didn't want to make our house smell like grilled lamb. You see, our house is for sale, and cooking lamb meatballs in your oven is the type of thing Realtors frown upon.

So, we grilled them for 20 minutes on a baking pan (trying to maintain a roughly 400 F temperature in the grill), turning them 3 times during that time. They came out perfectly crispy. I'd highly recommend cooking them this way.

To serve, we chose to eat them on a fresh baguette from one of the amazing bakeries here in Durham. And with a base of an oven roasted tomato puree on the bread, a side of the remaining tomatoes, and a cucumber salad, this dinner was darn near perfect.

Using beef in addition to lamb gave the meatballs a really great flavor balance. The garam masala is prominent, but not overwhelming, and the ginger adds a unique element to this recipe.