Currently cooking from Whole Grains, Every Day, Every Way by Lorna Sass.

My first dish out of the next cookbook, “Whole Grains, Every Day Every Way”, by Lorna Sass, did not start off auspiciously: It was too ugly to take pictures of.

After baking my way through “The Art & Soul of Baking”, I wanted to choose a nonbaking cookbook. And since I’m always trying to eat more grains, I figured this was a good way to get me to cook from this book which has been sitting on my shelf for about a year, untouched.

In this recipe, cooked fine bulgur is mixed with lamb, spices and onions and formed into meatballs or loaves. According to Sass, it is a popular dish in the Middle East. Bulgur has been a favorite grain of mine for a long time. I usually use it like rice, as a bed for something else. Since I don’t like lamb, I decided to go with one of the variations and used beef instead. I also used a coarser grind of bulgur instead of the fine bulgur called for, since it was all I could find.

My plan was to form the bulgur/beef mixture into meatballs, brown them in some oil and then finish cooking them in tomato sauce. The recipe started out easily enough. While the bulgur was cooking, I chopped up an onion in the food processor and added spices (cinnamon, allspice, cumin, cayenne and salt). Once the bulgur was finished, it was added to the food processor and the whole shebang was pulsed a few times. You then mix the bulgur and the meat together and shape it. Here’s where my problems started.

The bulgur/meat mixture was very loose and soft. And very brownish gray. I couldn’t get the meat to hold together, so I added an egg as a binder. It seemed to work, until I started frying the meatballs. They pretty much collapsed. By this time, I was starting to worry that we’d be eating cereal for dinner. In an attempt to rescue the meal, I grabbed the rest of the uncooked meatballs, rescued what I could from the frying pan and pressed the whole thing into a 9×13-inch pan and baked it for about 30 minutes (in fact, this is what Sass says she typically does).

I was still determined to incorporate tomato sauce, so once the dish was out of the oven, I cut slabs and covered them with tomato sauce. Although the dish looked like bleeding dirt (with the tomato sauce) and had the texture of loose dirt, it smelled pretty darn good. And it tasted pretty good as well. We both had seconds. I was a little afraid of using cinnamon and allspice in a savory dish, but they worked. You don’t get a big hit of either spice, just a pleasant backnote, balanced nicely by the onion and pepper.

In trying to figure out what went wrong with the recipe, I think it had to do with substituting the coarser bulgur for the fine. In Sass’ notes about bulgur, she notes that fine bulgur triples in size when cooked, whereas coarser bulgur quadruples in size. I didn’t take that into account when I used coarse bulgur, so I believe I ended up with too much grain versus meat.

The dish had a lot of promise and I’ll probably take another stab at it soon. Maybe it’ll even be pretty enough for pictures.