Perhaps you remember the lamb pizza I posted about way back when? How good it is when you’ve rolled it up with a mint leaf and dipped it in a bowl of garlic-laced yogurt? This dish is just like that, only on noodles. Oh my god it was so good. Heading straight into the repertoire, this one is.

I found this recipe in the book Olives and Oranges, which is a wildly attractive cookbook and full of the kinds of things I like best to eat. The recipe is really straightforward and simple, and takes hardly any time to prepare – about as long as it takes the pasta water to boil. The resulting pasta is a thick tangle of noodles drenched in tart yogurt sauce, studded with lamb and pine nuts and the occasional spark of hot chile or raw garlic.

This would be great with a tossed green salad or cooked greens, but we ate it with cold grilled eggpant and it was beyond sublime. Add a bottle of good red wine and you, like us, will be happy.

Spaghetti with lamb, yogurt and pine nuts

adapted from Olives and Oranges by Sara Jenkins (serves four)

• 1 cup plain, whole-milk yogurt
• 2 cloves garlic, minced (divided)
• 1/2 cup fresh mint leaves, chopped (divided)
• 1/2 tsp red chile flakes
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 sweet onion, minced
• small handful of pine nuts
• 1/2 Tbsp butter
• 1 pound ground lamb
• kosher salt
• 1/2 pound thin spaghetti noodles
• black pepper

Get a large pot of water set to boil.

Stir together yogurt, chile flakes, half of the garlic and half of the mint.

Saute onion and the rest of the garlic in oil. Add pine nuts and butter and cook until the pine nuts are just beginning to brown. Scrape into the yogurt mixture and stir.

Add lamb to the skillet, salt it lightly and cook until well browned. Strain off some of the liquid if it’s particularly fatty.

Cook pasta until just done. Drain and toss in a large bowl with half the lamb and half the yogurt. Add remaining lamb, yogurt and mint and toss it all up well. Add lots of black pepper (if you remember – I forgot this part, but it’s a good idea). Serve. Schlurp.

One of the treasures that we brought back from Kansas City (and, no doubt, were responsible for our suitcase being searched) was this bunch of gorgeous skewers. They’re just what we’ve been wanting: long, flat and wide. Finally, we thought, we can make ground-meat kebabs without the meat falling off the skewer!

We were wrong, of course.

After Jon mixed up the spiced meat and lovingly molded it around the skewers, he rigged up a clever system of foil-wrapped bricks to suspend the kebabs over the grates. The meat promptly fell off the skewers.

Fortunately, even having dripped down onto the grates, the meat cooked just fine as a sort of elongated burger. And it was fantastically delicious, rather like exceptionally good gyros. We ate them stuffed into whole wheat pita which we had toasted on the grill, along with a Turkish cucumber-yogurt sauce called cacik and a pan of beautiful roasted cauliflower.

This was our second grilling dinner so far this year (the day before we did steaks and asparagus). It may turn out to be a while before we can grill again, but this meal made me think that summer might someday come for real.

Butcher’s Köfte Kebabs

adapted from Turquoise: A Chef’s Travels in Turkey by Greg and Lucy Malouf

• 1 pound ground lamb
• 1 pound ground beef
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• half a cup diced tomato (the recipe calls for two fresh tomatoes, but I just used a handful of drained diced canned tomatoes)
• 2 tsp pomegranate molasses
• 2 Tbsp kofte spice mix (see below)
• salt and pepper

Mix all the ingredients together and mush up well in a bowl. Refrigerate for half an hour, then mold the mixture onto skewers and grill. Or maybe just make it into hamburger patties, if you have our luck with skewers. Serve with pita and a sauce made from Greek yogurt, grated cucumber, garlic and herbs.

Köfte Spice Mix

• 1/3 cup ground cumin
• 1/3 cup dried mint
• 1/3 cup dried oregano
• 2 Tbsp sweet paprika
• 2 Tbsp freshly ground black pepper
• 2 tsp hot paprika

Mix everything together and store in a jar.

A couple of months ago we had a nice splurge at Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks. One of our more exciting acquisitions was a copy of Greg Malouf’s Turquoise, a gorgeous production that immediately made me want to go to Turkey (not something that had ever happened to me before). Despite its beauty, I had completely failed to make anything out of it until this week, when I was suddenly feeling adventurous.

We decided to try two new side dishes during the week: a salad of grated celery root, peppers and mint, and a dish of baked mushrooms and chiles in a paprika sauce. I thought they both sounded interesting, and used vegetables that are at least somewhat in season.

The salad came first, alongside a straightforward roast chicken. It was easy to pull together, especially using a food processor to grate the celery root. It also had red onion, red hot pepper, yellow bell pepper, fresh mint, and fresh parsley, all of which I sliced by hand. It  was dressed with olive oil, garlic and white wine vinegar, then tossed with a bit of crumbled feta cheese. The end result? Not bad, like a refined coleslaw with a hint of spiciness.

It held up pretty well. Two days later I improvised a lunch by combining some of the salad with some of the shredded chicken and a spoonful of mayonnaise, piling it on a whole wheat English muffin. Not bad at all.

The mushroom thing was a bit more of a production, but still not difficult. I cooked some chopped red onion in olive oil, stirred in cumin, sweet paprika and hot paprika, then arranged whole button mushrooms, halved and seeded red and green chile peppers, and tomato wedges on top. This was all sprinkled with thyme and salt, then I added a bit of water to the pan and baked it for about half an hour. Once the mushrooms finally began to soften (I spooned some of the pan liquid over them to speed it up) I took the pan out and put it over high heat to boil down the sauce.

The finished dish was interesting. The mushrooms were firm and meaty, but the tomatoes and peppers had gotten very soft, and the sauce was extremely perky (the chiles were perfectly edible, having leached their heat into everything else). We served it as suggested, with some rare steak laid in slices over the top of the vegetables, and I found that I was desperately craving mashed potatoes to soak up the sauce. I liked it better several days later, when I took some to work for lunch along with a small container of crumbled feta. The flavors had mellowed, and the feta provided a much-needed counterpoint to the sauce.

My current feeling is that this cookbook might be more for eye candy than for recipes, but both of these dishes were simple to make and nice enough to eat. I’ll definitely try some others. Does anyone else have a copy of Turquoise? Have you tried any recipes that turned out really great?