This is a little strange, and I came up with it one Saturday because I was being lazy again. I’d had lunch at one of our local restaurants that serves up an excellent lamb and falafel gyro. It was so good that I just picked up two more to take home when I left. After taking all the filling out of the gyros and chopping everything up, I thought I was set. When I served this the first time, I had left out the pita bread, and that was a complaint. They didn’t like the store bought pie crust that was under this one. Next time I made this, I used the Pizza Dough Crust and everyone was happy. And I cooked the lamb myself but left out the falafel since no one could taste it anyway.
Ingredients:
- 1 lb ground lamb
- 1 cup shredded onion
- 4-6 minced garlic cloves, divided
- 3/4 teaspoon sea salt
- 1/2 teaspoon ground marjoram
- 1/2 teaspoon ground rosemary
- 1/2 teaspoon ground thyme
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
- 1 shredded cucumber
- 1 1/2 cup plain Greek yogurt
- 1 cup diced tomato, drained
- 2 cups feta cheese
- 2 pizza dough crust pie pans
Filling:
Place onion in food processor and run till finely chopped. Wrap onion in a paper towel and squeeze out liquids. Place back in food processor with lamb, half of the garlic, salt, marjoram, rosemary, thyme, cumin and black pepper and run for about 2 minutes until finely chopped and thoroughly mixed. Remove the mixture from processor and form into a ball, wrap with plastic and put it in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. Preheat oven to 325. Remove plastic wrap from meat ball and form into a meatloaf shape and put into a loaf pan. Press it down to make sure there are no air pockets. Place in the oven for 1 hour, draining off the fat about halfway through. Save fat for mixing in with quiche base for extra flavor. Remove from oven and allow to cool until you can safely handle it so you can chop it up into 1-inch or so chunks. Put away until ready for final assembly. To make a Tzatziki sauce, peel and deseed the cucumber and shred it. Wrap it in a paper towel and squeeze out most of the liquid. Then mix this with the yogurt and and the other half of garlic. Set this aside in refrigerator till ready for assembly.
Final Assembly and Cooking:
Preheat oven to 375. Prepare quiche base and, while mixing, fold in Tzatziki sauce and mix thoroughly. In the pie pans mix together the meat chunks and diced tomato. Then pour the quiche base mixture over that. The next stop is the oven. Bake for 40 minutes and remove from the oven and top with the feta cheese. Either serve right away or pack it up for the trip to the rink.