I could slide up to the Take Away, or I could make my own ...
The Turkish Döner is a huge kebab of spiced lamb meat, shaved and served in a pitta with salad. Not wanting to make a half-tonne kebab, I made a small approximation from lamb mince.
Take a pound of lamb mince into a mixing bowl and sprinkle over ground coriander, ground cumin, black pepper and sea salt. Squish it together, giving it a really good squeeze through your fingers - you want the texture to be mush.
Take a large onion and a couple of cloves of garlic along with a chilli, or two. Blend the lot and sieve off the excess water.
Add the onion mix to the meat and work through again.
Now, collect up the meat mixture and spread it out into an ovenproof dish into a layer about an inch and a half thick. It will shrink during the cooking ...
... into the oven set to 200C (400F?) for maybe an hour. it will shrink, the top will colour up and the juices will flow out, so flip the cake over after about 45 minutes and then cook on.
Remove from the oven and ideally, allow to cool. In an imperfect world, just slice it through as thin as you can and carry on, but if you did let it cool a bit, now slice it through really thin and pop the slices under the grill to give the appearance of those proper shaved Döners.
You weren't just sitting around while the meat was cooking, were you? You did make up some salad - lettuce, red cabbage, cucumber and tomato; bowl of sheep or goat yoghurt; Tabasco sauces at the ready!
You'll notice some pittas on the plate next to the meat ... yes, pittas!
Not paleo, not primal, not ancestral, absolutely neolithic, but ... first, it's Friday and who cares? Life really is too short. Secondly, I do have a sensitivity to gluten and will be belching up nuclear heartburn within the hour after eatnig bread. Curiously, none of these flat breads do that to me - not wraps, tortilla, Swedish flatbreads, pitta, none of them. n=1?
I'm not saying it's right, just not absolutely wrong. YMMV, naturally.
So, my Döner ...
Open up a pitta, push in some salad, some meat, some yoghurt and a damn good splash of Tabasco. Eat greedily, noisily, hungrily and enjoy the hell out of it! Down your beer, burp, smile, live ...
