Easy lamb cutlets & tabouleh...

As promised, here is another easy weeknight meal I cooked of late. I mentioned in my recent post about lamb cutlets that they are on the expensive side for us (and this is true), however I don't actually eat a lot of red meat other than cutlets, and they're so yummy... so sometimes its worth the splurge! 

Recently I found a lovely tray of cutlets that were just so nice looking and so lean, I could not pass them up! What to do with them? Cutlets with olives again? Tempting, but no... BBQ? No (Boofy had left the BBQ out in the rain and couldn't be bothered cleaning it! Lol) OK so they needed to be cooked inside in a pan... not my favourite way to cook meat, I much prefer BBQ (I'm very fussy with red meat, which is why I don't eat a lot of it).

I recalled that a couple of weeks ago when I was flicking for this cake recipe for Boofy's birthday, I came across a recipe for tabouleh and it briefly crossed my mind that I hadn't made it for ages! Its quick, easy and healthy if you make it yourself - so why not! So here is what I decided on:

EASY SPICED CUTLETS
Ingredients
Cutlets
Olive oil
Ground cumin
Ground coriander
Garam masala
Natural yoghurt to serve (or extra light sour cream if you prefer)

Method
If desired, bash your cutlets to flatten them a little (I would have done this… but my meat basher thingy has gone missing... No idea of its whereabouts!)

Mix together equal amounts of ground coriander and garam masala, and then put slightly more cumin than the others in. Put in only enough olive oil to make a dry-ish sort of paste and mix together. Rub the paste on the cutlets and cook in a non stick pan over a medium to high heat until done to your liking.

Note: I always put more cumin in than anything else because I'm totally addicted to it, but just do it to your taste… I have a thousand packets of ground cumin in the pantry at all times, because my personal opinion is that everything can be enhanced with cumin!! Lol… As an aside - the absolute best way to make a boring vegetable taste exciting and exotic is this… steam the vegetable in the microwave with cumin seeds and a little butter - this works especially well with things like zucchini, squash and choko which are cheap in season but don’t have a lot of flavour. I don't do that one for every night meals (can't justify putting butter on veges every night - eek!) but its nice if you're having a casual meal with friends and just want to tart it up a bit :)

So, onto the tabouleh. There are a million recipes for this - mine is the cheat's version, very plain, because I prefer it that way! I love the flavour of fresh herbs and I want to be able to taste them… Here is my recipe (of sorts!):

TABOULEH
Ingredients
2 decent size bunches of Continental Parsley
2 decent size bunches of Mint
4 small tomatoes
1 bag San Remo boil in the bag couscous
Lemon juice
Olive oil
Salt flakes

Method

Put the bag of couscous into a bowl and cover with boiling water. Leave for about 4 minutes, then empty water out, run under cold water and squeeze as much water out of the bag without burning yourself as you can! Dry off your bowl, split the bag and empty the couscous into the bowl. Give it a quick whip with a fork to separate it and wait for it to cool.

Chop the parsley and mint - I chop it fairly coarsely as I prefer it this way, but you can do it finely chopped if you prefer - throw together into a bowl. Cut tomatoes in half and scoop out seeds (if you are cooking anything in a tomato based sauce in the next couple of days, put in a container in the fridge to use for that). Finely and evenly dice the de-seeded tomatoes.

Combine the couscous with the herb mixture and give it a good stir to combine. Pour over a small amount of olive oil and equal amount (or slightly more) of lemon juice - I use lemon squeeze if I've got no lemons. Put in a generous pinch of salt flakes. Stir to combine and then taste - add more lemon juice, olive oil or salt if required. I don't like my tabouleh too oily so I tend to go really easy with the first splash - you can always add more but you can't take it out!

If you wanted to, you could put some chopped spring onions in your tabouleh too, but I don't personally like the taste of raw onion, so I leave it out - up to you.  This actually makes a huge amount of tabouleh (about 4 serves for us - we had it for dinner, then both of us had a generous amount for lunch the next day).  If you can cope with it for dinner 2 nights in a row, an even easier meal is to shred some BBQ chook through the tabouleh and serve with yoghurt - so yummy!  So this is the sort of amount we're talking about - this is quite a large bowl:

To serve, I put a tablespoon of natural yoghurt (or in this case light sour cream - that's what we had!) on the plate with a mint sprig, then a generous serve of tabouleh.  When the cutlets are cooked, add them to the plate too. 

You could also serve this with some microwaved pappadums, which are very low in fat and would be yummy with this flavour combination.

Bye for now :)