RecipeBlogs: Meatballs & Baked Zucchini
Part of eating a more healthy diet is eating seasonally but it can be easy to fall into a rut. My family can be more open minded to eating their veg when they are prepared with a bit of imagination rather than boiled and dumped at the side of the plate. On this occasion, I had courgettes / zucchini in mind when I started looking for new recipes to try.
I stumbled on Almost Turkish and found a wonderful assortment of fast and interesting meals. Burcu posts traditional and modern dishes with mouth-watering photographs, including the jackpot for our own dinner: her mother’s recipe for baked zucchini (courgette).
It may sound silly to base a meal around a side-dish but that’s exactly what I did. It was easy though, spoilt for choice on Burcu’s site. I opted for the traditional meatballs that Burcu has recreated as remembered from her hometown of Tekirdağ. These are made with a mixture of lamb and beef and mirror the pepper and mint flavour of the vegetables. The recipe as given would feed four with ease, I froze half for a future fast meal.
Unfortunately I was low on dried mint, so I used it on the zucchini and used fresh mint for the meatballs, a slight change which did not harm the flavour at all. I wouldn’t recommend trying fresh mint on the vegetables though as they would not stand up to the cooking time.
The turkish meatballs were really nice — however, I would cut the chile seeds right down if you are serving to young children. My partner thought they were fine but turned down my offer of extra chile sauce on the side. The zucchini was lovely, soft and spicy with the flavour of the mint really coming through. I took Burcu’s advice and added a bit of garlic to the yogurt.
We had a roasted pepper salad with some chopped up preserved lemons as a side dish. The sweet flavour balanced well with the rest of the meal - and the lemon was perfect. If I hadn’t used the preserved lemons then I think I would have used lemon juice in some way, as a salad dressing or mixed into the yogurt perhaps. The flavour really complimented the rest of the meal.
As a side-note, I made a small batch of these without the breadcrumbs/semolina in order to offer a low-carb meal. I would cut down the egg a bit and you need to take care when forming and serving the meatballs but the result still got positive reviews.
Almost Turkish has a wide variety of interesting (and simple) dishes to try, with an emphasis on vegetables. If you want to try to add a bit of unexpected spice to your meals, I certainly recommend giving her blog a browse.
