Potato lamb cakes

It occurs to me that I need to start coming up with more clever names for the stuff I make. I guess in one sense the name should correspond with the actual awesomeness of the dish...which is pretty low. I could theoretically name things classier or more exciting, but I find the short, blunt, straightforward approach a thing of personal endearment.

Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will be simultaneously undergoing the experience of preparing royal poison and being the royal taste-tester first-hand. Today's dish is a plate of lamb patties fried in oil and mashed potatoes powder.

This picture pushes the limits of Yifan's aesthetic sense, which aptly demonstrates how very limited it was. It's all downhill from here, which means, quite literally, that it won't be pretty.

I did promise everyone that I'd make something unhealthy, and I did. Today's dish, by the way, is partly thanks to my roommate Feng's deft hands and love of oil. What you see above is a lot of oil. Quite a lot of oil. Worked out great though - turns out mashed potato powder absorbs oil like a kitten absorbs mental energy from everyone in a radius of sight.

The idea is, and I hesitate to drive in this point every post, simple. Shape ground lamb into patties, layer on some mayonnaise (yes, it's that idea again - Yifan has limited creativity), dunk the patties in mashed potato powder. There's the crux of this dish. Using mashed potato powder in conjunction with oil is basically delicious for your mouth and disastrous for your heart. Toss on spices (I know people might be tired of my cumin by now, but cumin on lamb is actually something of a necessity), and dunk in oil. Just watch that oil disappear and don't think too much about how it'll be disappearing into your arteries soon.

I want to make a point about the creation process. This thing looked disgusting while it was being made, and I had some serious doubts whether it would work. Mind, it didn't look that great even after being cooked, but at least I could taste it to check.

Covering lamb meat in white was meant to make it return to its lamb state and frolic around but instead it just looks like a dead piece of meat...covered in potato powder.

It also felt disgusting. When you're using your fingers to slather on the mayonnaise, the potato powder loves your fingers more than it loves the lamb, which means it'll stick on you like bloodthirsty leeches on a hemophiliac. Has anyone played with glue or starch so much that eventually you just get this dry, crusty white stuff all over your hands? Imagine that except now you're forced to rub it on your soft, gooey, mildly bloody food. I now know why people enjoy cooking.

The asparagus was a rather last-minute decision. It soaks up the rest of the flavor nicely though, and of course it offers a better aesthetic appeal than just the cooked murdered innocence on a plate that this dish would otherwise be (those poor innocent potatoes - rest in peace). Also it gives me an excuse to call this dish healthier than it should honestly be.

Well, that's today's meal. Eventually I'll have to move on to dishes that don't just involve me using my hands and a giant knife for everything, but until then I'm honestly quite happy pretending I'm a mad scientist working with carcasses while I cook up a succulent meal for myself and my friends (who, curiously, never eat more than a bite of my stuff). Look forward to probably not a change of pace next week!