Another delicious meal from
Jerusalem cookbook! While the recipe was named "beef meatballs," it called for 10 oz ground beef and 5 oz ground lamb. Also, the recipe uses fava beans. We couldn't find fava beans, neither fresh or frozen. We replaced fava with frozen baby lima beans. The recipe was simple and easy to follow like others from the book. The time consuming process was chopping multiple kinds of fresh herbs as usual. I didn't remove any skins from beans. The recipe said "remove the skins from half the fava beans and discard the skins", which sounded too much to do. Plus, perhaps because mine weren't fava, the baby lima beans were very tender after quick blanch and I was almost squashing a lima bean when I tried to remove the skin.
We served meatballs with Basmati rice and orzo according to the book's recommendation. The recipe for the rice and orzo mixture said "Try this and you may not want to cook plain rice ever again". We'll see.
The result was fantastic. All together - the meatballs, lima bean sauce, and rice & orzo tasted absolutely flavorful and delicious. I don't think removing skins from lima beans was necessary. I liked Basmati rice and orzo. Surely it would be a nice alternative to plain rice.
