From My Kitchen

Please please please can lockdown end soon (and summer arrive) so that we can have a whole bunch of friends and family over and feed everyone with these incredibly simple and tasty kebabs? Pretty please? Until then, we’ll just keep making them and dreaming about better times. This is most definitely something I wish I’d made for my father, but I make sure I eat a whole bunch of pickled peppers every time we eat it now, because that’s what he would have done. Man alive he loved pickled vegetables – we once found him pickling brussels sprouts! Serves 4 and can be made in half an hour. Seriously. Also, see below for my father’s foolproof pitta tip.

Ingredients

Kebab:

500g minced lamb

2 tsp garlic powder

1.5 tsp cumin

1.5 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp smoked paprika

Plenty of salt + pepper

Red cabbage:

Half a small red cabbage

3 tbsp olive oil

3 tbsp lemon juice

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

Plus:

8 pitta

Lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, sliced white onion

Pickled peppers

Mayo, chilli sauce

Method: Kebab

1. Heat oven to 180C fan and grease a loaf tin or other small flat bottomed roasting tin.
2. Put the kebab ingredients in a large bowl and use your hands to squish it all together, working the meat for a good 5 minutes, kneading it in the bowl, until smooth.
3. Pop the mix into the prepared tin and squash it all down – you want to end up with the meat being about an inch thick.
4. Fling it in the oven for 20 minutes, then remove and leave to rest in the tin for 5 minutes.
5. When ready to serve, remove from the tin and slice as thinly as you can lengthwise. That’s it!

Method: Red cabbage

1. Shred the cabbage finely and put it in a bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Mix well and leave for up to half an hour, mix again. Serve. It’s really that simple.

Pitta tip!

Don’t ever try to open a cold pitta, it won’t work and you’ll end up with a mess. Instead, pat both sides of each pitta with a little water and them fling them in the toaster / under a grill / in the oven if you’re already using it, for around 45 seconds then flip them over for another 45 seconds (leave them in the oven for 5 minutes). Your pitta should now be a little too hot to handle, but you need to be brave and slice it open carefully with a sharp knife along one long side. It’ll open up easily, the steam inside working it’s magic.