Sous Chef Sanjeewa Chamil, of Assymetri at Radisson Blu Yas Island, celebrates the season with this great Ramadan inspired dish. He says, “this is such a simple dish and is full of flavour. It can be prepared in advance and heated when needed, perfect for iftar.” Serves 6 people.

Ingredients:

• 500g minced lamb
• 10g fresh mint
• 10g fresh parsley
• Salt & black pepper to taste
• 20ml olive oil
• Arabic spice to taste
• 1 kg potato
• 1 kg tomato
• 50g onions

For tomato sauce:

• 500g tomato
• 10g tomato paste
• 10g garlic
• 100g onion
• Salt & pepper to taste
• 20ml olive oil
• 5g paprika
• 1 sprig fresh coriander

Method:

1. Mix minced lamb with chopped parsley, mint and spices, season well and work in a little olive oil
2. Shape into kofta and grill until medium cooked
3. Slice the potato and sauté in a little olive oil until half cooked

To make the sauce:

1. Sauté the chopped garlic and onion in olive oil
2. Add the tomato paste and cook on low heat for one minute
3. Add chopped tomatoes and the rest of the ingredients

To assemble:

1. Place the part cooked sliced potatoes at the bottom of an oven proof dish
2. Place fresh tomato sliceson top and cover with the kofta and some sliced onions
3. Pour the sauce over and bake for 15 minute in a preheated oven at 200C

Check out our very own Tried and Tested review of this recipe below:

Ramadan Kareem! Sous Chef Sanjeewa Chamil of Assymetri at Radisson Blu Yas Island provided this dish to help celebrate the season. The recipe says that you can prepare it in advance and heat through right before serving, making this recipe perfect for iftar.

We began by sauteing the potatoes in olive oil. We would suggest cooking the potatoes all the way through as an extra 15 minutes in the oven didn't allow for our mostly cooked slices to become fully cooked, even after leaving them in for an extra ten minutes.

Afterwards, we made the tomato sauce, which came together very quickly and easily. For the koftas, we didn't have minced lamb so we used minced beef instead, and shaped the patties into round ovals, similar to hamburger patties. We also added chopped onions into the mixture however, since the patties didn't hold very well together, we'd suggest either adding some breadcrumbs or an egg to make easier to handle as ours were a bit lumpy and very crumbly.

Since we don't have a grill, we fried the koftas in olive oil, which left them extra juicy. We then placed everything in the fridge since we'd planned on finishing it off for iftar the next day. If you do plan on preparing the meal ahead of time, like we did, we would suggest warming up each individual portion again before combining them together to help speed up cooking time.

The assembly was very easy as we had already placed our potatoes into the oven proof dish, we simply added cut up tomatoes slices (we used three small ones to cover everything), placed the koftas on top and spooned the sauce over them and let it cook in the oven for twenty minutes. If you're a fan of lots of sauce, make a bit more than noted to get everything covered to your liking.

We then took the enormous dish (it served 8 people easily) to a friends house for iftar. Everyone really enjoyed the dish and we got an “official stamp of approval” from one of our taste testers. The meat was juicy and well seasoned and the tomato sauce was delicious. We only wished we had cooked our potatoes more in the first place, since some of them were not as soft as we'd liked. Overall, this dish was quite the success and well worth the effort!

We give it four out of five spoons!