Vince had never had kibbeh. I told him . . you’re pretty lucky to have me because without me, you would never have had crawfish, oysters on the half shell or kibbeh! I think he agreed with me but he was hungry. He was probably thinking . . without you, I’d have a heck of a lot more money and a whole lot less crazy ideas to listen to! Oh well . . I’m sticking with my thought that he’s lucky to have me!
When looking for a kibbeh recipe, I came across The Mediterranean Dish and she has some unbelievable recipes. Lots of fig recipes! I’m familiar enough with Italian recipes but I never have done much with Greek, Syrian, Moroccan or Lebanese dishes and most everything on The Mediterranean Dish looks pretty good to me.
This is her kibbeh recipe that I followed pretty exactly. This is one of those recipes that seems way more complicated than it is. It wasn’t hard and wasn’t very time consuming at all. I didn’t have any bulgur here so I cracked what and wish I had cracked it just a tad smaller. Not having any bulgur to look at, and not wanting to get it close to being like flour, I left it a little large. Next time, I’ll crack the wheat into smaller pieces.
Cracking Wheat
The only thing I would change about the recipe is that it needed a bit more salt for our liking. Her quantities were perfect. I ended up running out of the filling at exactly the same time I ran out of the outer layer ingredients. Her tips were great. It was really easy to make it.
Kibbeh
I struggled at first with shaping them. They’re supposed to look like footballs and mine look more like something the dog left in the yard! Knowing how brown they get when fried, that’s not a good image of what you’re going to eat. The first ones were also much larger than I remember them being. I kept having “blowouts” with the filling poking through and I was having to add more outer layer but after a while, I started making them into balls and then squishing the ends so they ended up more like football shapes and smaller.
Kibbeh
They were totally delicious. Several times while eating them, Vince said “I love this kind of food!” He loves flavor . . thing bland and tasteless and this recipe has lots of flavors, along with the crunchy wheat in the outer coating. The salad is another recipe from The Mediterranean Dish site. I had dried garbanzo beans and I cooked those in the pressure cooker. The “dip” for the kibbeh is a yogurt/cucumber dip (also from the same site) and it was delicious. Vince wanted to combine the leftover salad with the yogurt mix so we did and I think that’s going to be yummy too.
I ended up with 35 kibbeh. I cooked 3 for Vince and 2 for me so, using those same numbers, I’ll get 7 meals from my efforts . . not bad!
Dottie N. says
Looks good!
acityquilter says
you should try kufta next…also shaped sorta the same way….deeelish!
Kellie steele says
I was looking at buying one of those mills and was wondering if you would recommend them. I don’t k ow any one personally that owns one. What model do you have? Is it good for grinding flour?
Kind regards
Kellie
Andrea says
I love kibbeh, but I’m a sucker for anything with pine nuts. 🙂
There’s an Egyptian dish called koshary (sometimes spelled koshari) that I also love. It does have tomato sauce in it, but you can add as much or as little as you like. Sometimes I don’t add any at all, and sometimes I put in just enough to get a tomato taste but not so much that it’s sloppy.