Lamb meatloaf with Tahini Sauce and Tomatoes

One of my new year resolutions was to try out a new recipe every week. It’s a resolution every year, but with work and other life stuff, I never stick to it. But in this time of weirdness, it seemed a good thing to resurrect.

This is an Ottolenghi recipe, and here’s a link to the recipe instead of me writing it out here as it’s a bit long – Lamb meatloaf with tahini sauce and tomatoes. (it’s the 3^rd recipe down) My version was more Ottolenghesque, because I didn’t have some of the ingredients, and tweaked some of the others.  I had around 400g of lamb, and the recipe called for 500g, but it was close enough.

Put the lamb in a bowl. Blitz up a carrot and onion and add to the lamb. The recipe calls for doing the same to a courgette/zucchini, which I didn’t have, but I had a sorry looking stick of celery, so zapped that and added as well.

Added a couple of minced garlic cloves, a good grating of parmesan (the recipe calls for pecorino, which I didn’t have), a dollop of tomato paste and two tsps of ground cumin. The recipe calls for allspice which I don’t have in my cupboard, although I could have sworn I had, so I added a little cinnamon, nutmeg and pepper. Also a good grinding of salt. Blitz up enough breadcrumbs to create a good binding (I used one slice of bread, but it would depend on your bread). Then get your hands in and give everything a good mix

(I should say that the recipe also calls for two eggs to go into this mixture, but I didn’t add any eggs, because when I’d mixed, it was still a pretty wet mixture, so I didn’t want to make it any wetter.  Having said that, I forgot the instructions to leave the veg in a sieve and squeeze to get as much water out as possible. I just put them straight in with the lamb, so that might have made a difference. As it was, it was fine without the eggs.)

Once everything is mixed, press it into a loaf tin, and put the tin in a casserole dish filled with enough water to come halfway up the sides of the tin.

Bake in an oven at 400F. The recipe calls for a baking of 1 hour, 10 mins, but I did it for about 45 mins and it was happily brown and cooked.

Take the tin out of the casserole dish and let it sit for 10 minutes before draining off the fat, and there was a lot of fat as you can see...

Turn it out and dress with the tahini/lemon/garlic sauce and chopped tomato. Meatloaf never looks elegant, but who cares!

I did some little rosemary roast potatoes to go with it – one potato did two of us nicely (which eeks out my potato stock), and some salad stuff.

Since this was a new recipe for me, I turned the taste test over to the husband and got back the elegant response that it was – and I quote – “The Dog’s Bollocks”. Shakespeare couldn’t have put it better…  I have to say, he was right, it was brilliant. And we have tons left over either for sandwiches or for other meals. Definitely one I will make again.