Kofta bi Tahini

Mama blinked back tears, swallowed hard and nodded.  ‘Really?’ I questioned  ‘It’s today? 22 years since Teta died today?’ She nodded again.  It has always moved me that even in your 70s you can love and miss and cry for your mother so much; an unbreakable bond.

Mama and I had been sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch while I flipped through cookery books when she told me it was the anniversary of her own mother’s death.  We spoke about teta for a while and the life she lived and the family she never met, until I asked mama what teta’s favourite meal was and that we should cook it that evening in commemoration.  So on Wednesday afternoon after picking Otis up from summer camp, I stopped off at the farm shop to buy minced beef and parsley and we had a wonderful dinner of kofta bi tahini while mama told Christopher and I stories about her mum.  It was so nice.

ingredients

kofta

500g minced beef

1 plum tomato

1 white onion

1 large handful of parsley

2tsp mixed spice

½ tsp paprika

Salt and pepper

Glug of olive oil

Splash of cider vinegar

1 bag of new potatoes

Small handful of almond slices

tahini sauce

1 cup tahini

2 cups warm water

2 lemons, juiced

1tsp salt (I actually put in a bit more, but do it to your taste)

 

method

• preheat oven to 200C
• In a blitzer, chop the onion, parsley, tomato and then mix with the beef, spices, salt and pepper and thoroughly mix together with your hands until well combined, soft and formed.
• In a baking tray, splash the cider vinegar, and oil and then roll the beef into balls and put on the tray
• Chop the potato into cubes and put on a (separate) baking tray covered in olive oil and salt.
• Put the tray of meat and tray of potatoes in the oven for 20 minutes.
• In the mean time make the tahini sauce by combining all the sauce ingredients in a sauce pan over a gentle heat combining until the sauce of free of lumps and smooth- it will be quite watery.
• After the 20 minutes cooking time, put the kofta and the potatoes on one tray, pour on the tahini sauce and cover with a lid or foil and put in the oven for another 15 minutes
• Remove the lid or foil after 25 minutes and scatter over the almonds and put back in the oven for another 10 minutes.
• Serve hot with a tomato salad.