Moroccan lamb parcels

Inspiration can come from anywhere.  My girlfriend and I are huge fans of Come Dine With Me, which is a ridiculously trashy cookery competition.  A recent episode featured a contestant cooking what she called moussaka parcels.  The recipe looked terrible (and it wasn't moussaka at all) but I liked the idea, and had a feeling it would be nice with a Moroccan-style recipe that I haven't used for a while.  Dishes evolve over time, and I had a feeling this would be a nice update to my Moroccan dish (which I originally adapted from a recipe in one of the Moro cookbooks).

My recipe was already a long way away from the original version in the cookbook, but the important thing I got from it was the spice mix: cardamom, cloves, cumin and garlic, plus a bit of chilli heat.

I've never made pastry.  It comes into the same category of "stuff that busy people needn't make because shop-bought stuff is just as good" as pasta.  Slightly bizarrely, this filo (from Waitrose) was made in France and clearly not intended for export to the UK as there was not a word of English on the packet!  I didn't realise it was such an exotic ingredient that it has to be imported specially.

Chop an onion, quite finely, then make up your spice mix.

Take four cardamom pods and open them up.  We're just using the seeds inside, so discard the skin.  Add four cloves, plus a clove of garlic.  Bash it all up in a pestle and mortar.  If you haven't got a pestle and mortar, put the cloves, cardamom seeds and garlic clove into a freezer bag, or maybe under a piece of greaseproof paper, and bash it all with a rolling pin or whatever heavy item falls to hand.

Heat some oil in a pan and add about a teaspoonful of cumin seeds and the spice mix.  Add your heat now as well.  You can use a fresh chilli pepper if you want, but I'm still cross about last night's dinner so I used cayenne pepper and dried chilli flakes from jars.  Different people like different levels of heat, and you will quickly learn how much heat to put in to suit your tastes.  I decided at the last minute to chuck in a teaspoonful of paprika too.  Swirl all the spices around in the hot oil for a couple of seconds, then throw in your chopped onion.  Mix it around so that it all gets coated in spices.

Once the onion has had a few minutes to go soft, add the lamb mince.  Cook until it's browned all over, then throw in a tin of tomatoes.

I'm going to digress for a moment on the subject of tinned tomatoes.  They're a very homogeneous product with not much to choose in terms of taste between the different brands (as long as you avoid the supermarket value brands), but for some reason there's a massive price difference.  I buy mine from Lidl, where they're 35p, but for some reason the other supermarket own brands vary in price up to almost 60p.  Some people insist on organic food and don't mind paying the extra - fine, that's your decision to make.  But for the non-organic version, I don't see any reason why I should pay nearly twice the price for a product with a different label on it when I can't tell the difference in taste.

All the above goes for onions too.  The onion I used today cost 20p from the farmers' market.  I popped into the supermarket for wine after I'd been to the farmers market, and happened to notice a string bag containing three onions for £1.20 - twice the price!  I know I'm banging on about pennies here, but it all adds up - think about how many onions and tins of tomatoes you buy in a year.  Wouldn't you want to halve that cost, if you could?

End of rant.  On with the recipe.  Bring the mixture to the boil, then reduce the heat as low as it will go.  Add salt, pepper and a splash of worcestershire sauce if you want to.

The mixture wants to simmer until almost all of the liquid has evaporated.  You will need to stir it occasionally (especially if your pan's not very non-stick) but for the most part you can go off and ignore it for a while.  Mine took thirty minutes, with the occasional visit to swoosh it about and make sure it wasn't sticking or burning.

Pre-heat your oven to 190C while the mixture cools off a bit so that you can work with it.

Once that's done, you can start making your parcels!  You will need a packet of filo pastry sheets and one egg, beaten lightly with a fork.  The filo sheets I'd bought seemed too big, so at first I cut them in half.  However, these weren't really strong enough and leaked their contents, so for the rest of the parcels I used one filo sheet per parcel.  The egg is used as glue.

This was a bit trial-and-error, and I'm sure that if you're good at wrapping Christmas presents you'll make nicer ones than me, but here's the method I settled on.

Fold a sheet of filo pastry in half.

Brush egg all around the edge.

Put two tablespoonfuls of lamb mixture in the middle.

Lift the edges of the pastry up all around the blob of mixture.  Press together at the top, so that the egged parts meet and stick together.

 Hopefully, this will create nice neat parcels.

 Brush them all over with egg - this will help the pastry go crispy and brown in the oven.

They only need about 15-20 minutes in the oven, which gives you plenty of time to prepare some veg.  We had purple sprouting broccoli, purely because it looked nice in the greengrocer.  Admittedly WeightWatchers has some part in the decision not to include any extra carbohydrate, but with the pastry I don't think this dish really needs it.  If I really wanted to add carbs, I'd probably just serve one parcel with green veg and sweet potato.

Taste verdict
You know when you haven't listened to a particular CD for ages, then you play it and you remember how much you used to love it?  I haven't used this spice mix for a long time, so it was just like that feeling.  Like meeting an old friend who's got an exciting new look.  My girlfriend loved it too (and unlike me, she's actually been to Morocco).  It's all deep, earthy flavours, crispy pastry and a nice little spice kick. 

Financial verdict
Onion - 20p
250g lamb mince - £1.70
Pack of filo pastry - £1.59
Tin of tomatoes - 35p
Egg - 30p
Broccoli - £1.69 (cheaper green veg is available and equally good for you) 
Herbs and spices - pennies, from store

I'm not quite sure how to calculate this.  These quantities made eight parcels, so we had two each, two have gone into the fridge for our lunches tomorrow and two have gone in the freezer.  We ate the whole bundle of Purple Sprouting, but that's purely because I went to a really good greengrocers today and it was too tempting - it might equally have been a few pence worth of peas from the freezer.  The plate we ate comes to £1.88 each, but we chose expensive veg today so a more sensible measure might be to call it 51p per parcel plus some veg.  Also, I didn't use all the filo pastry so there are still a few sheets in the fridge waiting for something delicious to happen to them.

The skinny
Prepare spice mix by peeling four cardamom pods and grinding their seeds plus four cloves and one peeled clove of garlic in a pestle and mortar (confusing sentence that.  Are we clear on the difference between cloves and garlic cloves?  Thought so.  Good).

Finely chop an onion.

Heat oil in a pan and add the spice mix, plus a teaspoonful each of cayenne pepper, dried chilli flakes and paprika.  Add the chopped onion and cook on a medium heat for 2-3 minutes until soft.

Add lamb mince and cook until browned all over.

Add a tin of tomatoes, a pinch of salt, a twist of pepper and a splash of worcestershire sauce.

Bring to the boil, then turn the heat down to the minimum and allow to simmer until most of the liquid has evaporated - this will take about 30 minutes.

Turn off the heat and allow the mixture to cool while the oven pre-heats to 190C.

Make parcels using one filo sheet, folded in half, and two tablespoonfuls of lamb mixture per parcel.  Use a whisked egg as glue.

Brush the parcels with egg and bake on greaseproof paper for 15-20 minutes until golden-brown.

Serve with green veg.


WeightWatchers ProPoints
For the meal we had, two parcels plus some veg, 6