Yes, it’s cold and snowy out there and I already only want to eat meat until spring, but I also work in New York, where it’s impossible to spend any time at all without having meatballs thrust upon you. (Er, “without encountering meatballs”? “Without reading about them” or “passing a restaurant that has them on the menu”?) Just off the top of my head, there’s The Meatball Shop, a recent meatball feature in The New York Times, Eataly’s braised brisket meatballs (Woe is me, they’re across the street from my office!) and Deb at Smitten Kitchen happened to run a beautiful post a few weeks ago about Canal House Cooking’s Scallion Meatballs. So who can blame me for having balls of meat on the brain?

Naturally, I wanted something a little bit different (not Italian, not Asian-inspired), so I searched for lamb meatballs recipe with a middle-eastern riff, which I found from Nigella Lawson/Food Network. Shall we all take a minute here to breathe a contented sigh as we picture the lovely Ms. Lawson? (aaaahhhh)

Her recipes have always worked for me, so tinkering was minimal, limited to replacing the semolina with quinoa flour to make these gluten-free. (Get the recipe here.)

Please ignore the Eddie Murphy welfare burger appearance of this meatball.

I decided to add a pomegranate glaze just because I wanted a bright contrast to the earthiness of the lamb. It worked so well, it’ll become a permanent part of the rotation, I believe. If it’s not too frou-frou, maybe I’ll even make it for a Super Bowl appetizer (though it won’t go well with the inevitable cheese dip).

But it was a late lunch for us today, so I served it with apricot and caramelized onion brown rice to make a meal of it. The rice was superfluous; we could’ve made an entire meal of the meatballs and lived happily to tell the tale.

recipe after the jump

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Grass-fed & -finished beef with red chimichurri over a raw kale salad. My Primal lunch did not suck in any way. At all. Big thanks to the folks at Walnut Grove Farm who made this gorgeous bit of sirloin possible. (They’re only at the market once a month, so I’ll be stocking up next time I see them. They’re a good source for leaf lard, too, once I get through the three cups of rendered lard still sitting in my fridge. It’ll be a while.)

The steak was so juicy and beefy, it didn’t really need the chimichurri, but I’d already made it a couple of hours before, just in case. You never know. It’s really my favorite sauce for steak, with bold flavors that somehow don’t overpower (or get overpowered by) beef, but it’s great on potatoes, eggs and probably a lot of other dishes I haven’t yet thought of, too.

Like many chimichurris, this one uses lots of parsley. I stopped my preparations to take a picture because, really, doesn’t this look like a bouquet? You could wrap the base in florist’s tape and ribbon and sell this to a bride for an outrageous price.

I was beginning to feel a little left out of the annual “What am I going to DO with all of this zucchini/squash?” discussion, so I picked up a metric shit-ton at the market. I already had plans for most of it, though — Summer Squash with Baked Eggs from The Kitchn. This is one of those recipes, like that amazing ratatouille from a few years ago, that becomes so much more than the sum of its parts, helped in no small measure by a liberal dose of smoked paprika. I plan to make this a regular feature for the next few weeks, while summer produce is still around.

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