Good morning everyone!

Nice of you to drop by.

We’re going to continue on our world culinary tour today with a stop for some of my absolute favorite ethnic cuisine ever.

Greek!

Ever notice that any diner worth it’s salt is usually a Greek diner?

I have a periodic obsession with Greek food. While that may sound odd it’s actually true. How it happens is something like this; I have Greek food, fucking love the hell out of it. Find myself sated and move on with my life.

Until…

I think about Greek food again.

Swear to god man it’s like a culinary ear worm. The second I think about it there’s not a goddamn thing I can consider eating until I have some Greek food. In my case it’s usually gyros. Also uniquely, I prefer the gyro plate to a gyro sandwich because with the plate you can grab entire handfuls of gyro meat without having any additional intrusions from other food stuffs.

It’s magical.

Another good reason to order the plate is that quite often it will come with a side dish of Greek potatoes.

Ever had the Greek potatoes that are slow roasted in olive oil with some lemon juice and garlic?

Fuck me those damn things are delicious.

We’re gonna hit that shit up today!

What actually got stuck in my mind this time was the leftover combination of pork/lamb that I had in my freezer from the time we made Cevapcici.

See, here it is now.

That wad-o-foil contains a 1 pound meat mixture that is 50% pork and 50% lamb that has been mixed together. And obviously we will be adding 1 pound of ground beef for today’s recipe.

The featured entree today will be keftedes or Greek meatballs.

A couple of years back I gave a lengthy treatise on meatballs. It covered different types of meatballs and the names for them around the world. Then I made some fucking meatballs. I mention keftedes specifically in that post because I love the little bastards so damn much.

There’s this Greek place over in Long Beach that make their keftedes in a nice red sauce which is the inspiration for today.

Speaking of meatballs, I have also previously made “bun cha” or Vietnamese meatballs.

That’s from our “bahn mi” recipe from two years ago.

And hell, if you want to get technical the Cevapcici is pretty much a goddamn meatball too. Today we will be cooking in the oven instead of on the grill however.

Alright kiddies we’ve got 3 dishes to make today, the meatballs, the potatoes and the red sauce so we better stop dicking around and get down to it.

Keftedes!

these damn things are also known as kefthedes, soutzoukakia and many other unpronounceable names but let’s stick with keftedes.

1 pound of ground beef

1/2 pound of ground lamb

1/2 pound of ground pork

2 slices of toast – I used whole grain but use whatever you have on hand

1/4 cup of milk

1 small onion basically pulverized

4 garlic cloves minced

2 eggs

1 teaspoon of cumin

1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon of dried oregano

1/2 cup of parsley chopped

1 teaspoon of salt

1 teaspoon of black pepper

First thing we’re gonna do is combine the 3 meats. You can use just beef here or beef and pork but I just wanted to do the 3 meat combination since the balance of the beef, the gaminess from the lamb and the fatty porky deliciousness is fucking delicious but you do whatever makes you happy here.

After mixing the meats, cover the meat with some plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for an hour or so to mingle. You can skip this step if you are only using one type of meat or if you’re in a hurry.

Next make some toast!

I really don’t have to give directions right?

Anyway put the 2 slices of toast in a bowl and cover with the milk. I had a photo of this but for some reason it was not exactly appetizing so I said “fuck that” and chose to ignore it. Let the toast soak for maybe 3-5 minutes of so until it absorbs the milk. Squeeze the milk out of the toast and add to the meat mixture.

For the onion we want to pulverize them for a nice smooth texture. I ain’t too crazy about large chunks of onion in my meatballs so I like mine pulsed a few times in a food processor.

Here you can see how fine the texture of the onions are post pulverization.

Add the rest of the meatball ingredients into the bowl of meat. Now wash your hands and prepare to get them dirty again. We are going to mix the bejabbers out of this shit.

There we go! We want to fully incorporate everything together so it becomes the sum of it’s parts. If that seems like a lot of parsley I get it but goddammit it’s a key component so just trust me here.

Refrigerate and rest. Hell you can do this a day in advance if you want.

Let’s get to work on the potatoes while the meat’s chilling out.

Greek potatoes with lemon and garlic!

2 pounds of potatoes peeled and cut into wedges

6-8 cloves of garlic – minced

1/2 cup of chicken stock

1/2 cup of olive oil – that’s correct and sorry about you spraying your computer screen with coffee/water/beer

Juice of one fresh lemon

1 teaspoon dried oregano

2 teaspoons of salt

1 teaspoon of pepper

Sprinkle of parsley to finish

Cut them potatoes into some chunky wedges first. Grease up the baking dish you are going to use for the potatoes. Grease that fucker up REAL good, as you will see shortly.

Next add in the garlic, chicken stock, lemon and olive oil.

Then we are going to add the seasonings and herbs and shit.

Now give these a right proper tossing.

And they are oven ready.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. These will have a total cook time of 1 & 1/2 hours but we will cook them for 45 minutes, give a good stir and cook them for the final 45 minutes. There’s some very cool symmetry and timeliness to the cooking time that I will demonstrate in a minute.

While the potatoes are in the oven let’s make a simple red sauce for the meatballs.

Greek Red Sauce!

1 tablespoon of olive oil

1 small/medium onion diced fine

3 garlic cloves minced

1/2 cup of good red wine

30 ounces of tomato sauce – that’s (2) 15 ounce cans where I come from

1 bay leaf

1 teaspoon of cumin

1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon of dried oregano

1/2 teaspoon of sugar – to temper the acidity of the tomato sauce a bit

Salt and pepper to taste

You can dice the onions here with a knife, no need for the food processor but if you already have it out from before why the fuck not?

Here’s the onion diced for the red sauce.

Pour the olive oil into a pot over a medium heat and saute the onions for about 7-8 minutes. Next we are going to add the garlic and then add in the red wine and saute the garlic and onion in the wine.

Yes, I’ve used this wine before since it’s a real goddamn tasty Malbec.

In goes the wine and garlic.

Saute for about a minute then add in the tomato sauce and the rest of the sauce ingredients.

There we go.

This can cook for as little as 30 minutes since it’s a fairly simple sauce but feel free to cook it as long as you would like to build the flavors.

Now let’s get that meat mixture out of the fridge and shape our keftedes. Look! Little footballs!

I gave the baking pan a good coating of oil to avoid stickage. Now sauce up them motherfuckers real good with the red sauce. Yes, I used the entire batch of sauce over the meatballs.

Now here’s that cool timing shit I mentioned earlier.

When the potatoes have cooked for the first 45 minutes. Take them out and give them a stir.

Now guess how long the meatballs will cook for? That’s right! For 45 minutes in a 400 degree oven. The exact amount of time needed to finish cooking the potatoes.

Not sure why I got so excited about that but it’s pretty fucking rare to have your main dishes finish at the same time and temperature so allow me this little bit on insanity.

The meatballs are ready for the oven.

  

Mother of GOD!

In go the meatballs and the potatoes.

When 45 minutes are up?

Here are our meatballs. Might want to get a quick drizzle of olive oil over the top of them for a nice finish.

And here are our finished potatoes.

Yeah, maybe consider a disposable pan next time would ya? Actually my casserole dish is pretty user friendly for cleaning but do look at the inside of that dish and plan your potato cooking vessel accordingly.

Now it’s about time to get our goddamn GRUB on!

You probably want to give both of these dishes about 10 minutes to hang out due to that whole “temperature of the surface of the Sun” shit.

Grab yourself the biggest plate you can find and get some of those potatoes and holy shit do they smell incredible. Garlicky with the herbs kicking through and that hint of lemon.

Here’s a close up of the potatoes.

Now get yourself some of the meatballs on that plate.

Add them both together?

Maybe a spinach salad? Little feta? Why not.

Grab a pita and get busy!

The first thing you notice with the meatballs is the tenderness of their texture. The 3 meats play together like a 3 piece power trio of RAWK! The hints of cinnamon from the meatballs and the sauce along with the oregano are intense yet familiar and very pleasing to the senses.

Those potatoes? Damn. Just DAMN! See? That olive oil was needed here. These aren’t too oily at all, they’re pretty goddamn close to perfect. You don’t have to pair these potatoes with just keftedes, shit no! Serve these fuckers on the regular with any main dish you can think up. So, so very damn good.

This is about as good of a combination as you can have and it’s as close as I’ve ever been able to duplicate dining in a Greek restaurant.

Every part of this meal is now a lifetime member of the yeah right year-long dinner rotation.

Just look at this!

Goddammit now I’m hungry again!

Hope each of you good folks have the same love for the cuisine of our fine Greek friends because I fucking love it and this is a sound representation as well.

Thanks again for stopping by.

Got a real fun one for you next week.

We’ll see you then.

PEACE!