I have written before about roasting a portion of boneless leg of lamb. This post covers the other use we make of lamb leg meat – minced, flavoured and formed into croquettes.

We have had our electric mincer for several years and we make good use of it to mince meat for various purposes, as well as fresh horseradish.

We still buy some minced meat from our butcher but, for a few favourite recipes, we use our own mincer to integrate other ingredients with the meat.

Last night we did just that as we prepared spiced lamb and fetta croquettes. These go very well accompanied by oven-heated Turkish bread plus some or all of tomato, spinach leaves and tzatziki.

Previously, we have cooked the croquettes in a non-stick pan with a little olive oil but we decided to bake this batch in the Weber Q and partnered them with some stuffed Dutch Cream potatoes and a simple dressed salad of cucumber and home-grown cherry tomatoes. It took about 25 minutes to cook the croquettes at about 180C.

Ingredients

1½ tbsp olive oil
1 smallish brown onion, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, finely diced
1½ tsp ground cumin
3/4 tsp ground coriander
small pinch chilli flakes or large pinch cayenne pepper
¼ tsp ground allspice
500g minced lamb or use diced lamb if you have a mincer
2 tbsp mint leaves
2 tbsp parsley leaves
1 egg
½ tsp salt
70-100g fetta, crumbled
1/3 cup brown rice cooked for 33 minutes in plenty of salted water (or ½ cup fresh bread crumbs)

Method

1. Heat olive oil in a pan over medium heat. Saute onion and garlic for 6 to 7 minutes until soft but not coloured. Add spices and cook for 1 minute. Remove from heat and allow to cool.
2. If you have a mincer, just put the lamb and herbs through the mincer together. If not, chop the herbs finely and mix with the lamb mince and cooled onion in a bowl. Add egg, salt, fetta and bread crumbs or rice and mix well.
3. Divide the lamb mix into about 15 portions and, using oiled hands, mould into croquettes.
4. Cook gently in a frypan with olive oil, turning once or twice to ensure even cooking.

For the stuffed potatoes, I pricked the skin of each potato thoroughly with a fork – to prevent a premature eruption of potato flesh – and boiled them gently for about 25 minutes (must be no longer than when the skin just begins to peel). When they were cool enough to handle – don’t use cold water, let them continue to cook in their own skins – Maggie sliced off a thin top layer, scooped out most of the flesh and mashed it with some butter, sour cream, salt, black pepper, paprika and plenty of finely chopped parsley and chives that I picked from our garden.

We put the potatoes in the Weber as we lit it and gave them a 10-minute head-start after the temperature reached 180C.