Rabbit Food for Lions
Lamb Meatballs
We hear “rabbit food” and think all that’s bad about dieting. Dull, lifeless, uninspiring. Not our thing — fitness and fine food should both enliven your experience of life, not deaden it. So the food Kevin and Russ cook, and the techniques and philosophy they share, turn standard rabbit food and make it fit for a lion. Read more about our cooking philosophy in the Second Helping Toolbox.
Lamb Meatballs
Serves 6-8 as main dish.
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 red onion
3 garlic cloves, raw or roasted
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/8 teaspoon fresh rosemary, chopped
5 leaves of mint, julianned
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar (or fig balsamic)
1/2 tablespoon ounce pine nuts, toasted and crushed
1 pound ground lamb
1 cup toasted whole wheat breadcrumbs
2 egg whites
Heat olive oil in small saucepan, adding onion, nuts, garlic, spices, and herbs until caramelized. Deglaze pan with Worcestershire and vinegar. Let it cool for about five minutes. Add onion-garlic mixture, breadcrumbs and egg whites to ground lamb and mix thoroughly.
Roll mixture to size of a ping-pong ball, and fry in olive oil until cooked through, no more than 2 minutes. Drain on paper towels.
Kevin created these meatballs as another all-purpose pantry stocker that he uses in a number of dishes, but it began with childhood memories of New York delis.
In our experience, there’s two different ways to think of “health food.” There’s the standard idea of using rabbit food — take your most common assumptions of “healthy food” and that’s what we mean.
Well, how these meatballs work in a “health food” context are two ideas that aren’t common:
1. Make sure you get the most flavor for the least fat
Most health food tend to use low-flavor ingredients — nutrition-wise, they’re fine. They’re also bland as hell without some cooking know-how or VERY high-quality produce. Kevin and I take the opposite approach — loading up on extremely high-flavor ingredients. Almost to the point it’s flavor overload; when the flavors are so intense and vivid, the portion control is built-in. I like to think of it as the eating equivalent of a sipping whiskey.
In terms of lamb’s health benefits, I kindly refer to you Dr. Gourmet. Lamb’s actually a pretty solid replacement for beef in your chicken/turkey/seafood world. Existing as a midpoint between pork and beef, the nutrition labels tend to forget one detail — Lamb packs more flavor per ounce of either pig or cattle. It boasts a tremendous depth, so in Kevin’s and my language, that translates into “a little goes a long way.”
It’s worth making a batch of these meatballs to throw into quick soups, fast sandwiches, flatbreads, or a fresh, springy twist on your usually grilled chicken salad. Now that I’ve posted the recipe for this online, make a batch and freeze ‘em. You’ll see these darlings appear in a few more of our recipes.
2. Liberate yourself from Familiar Trigger Foods by Overcoming Fear of the Unknown
Lamb seems like a luxurious meat to work with, and there can be the whole fear-of-the-unknown complex with it. This gets interesting from a healthy cooking standpoint: there’s not only the uncertainty with cooking with a new ingredient, there’s also the fear of “oh God, will this new ingredient make me fat again?”
Don’t fall for it. Cooking with new foods, trying has new dishes improves your cooking chops, but has an indirect health benefit as well: even if you feel like you’re splurging, working with new dishes, finding new favorites, even foods you’d consider reserved for “cheat nights,” is a simply way to lessen the power the trigger foods of yesteryear hold over you.
And if the pizza/cookies/family favorites of the past can be put in their place — the occasional treat — how can that not benefit your weight loss in the long run?
– Russ Lane
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