Homemade Gyros!

This morning, I found my brotein bar camping out on the back of the stove. It's amazing where I occasionally find these things!

I spent the majority of yet another day in the computer lab working on my research, but I spared a  couple seconds to capture the moment. Can you find the brotein bar???

A little later after several more hours of work I could feel my muscles wasting away, so I had another brotein bar. For those keeping score, this was my third off the day.

When I finally reached the point at which I could simply work no longer, I packed up and headed home. And today I hurried home in more anticipation than usual. Today was the day that we would be eating homemade gyros! Needless to say, I was a little excited. I prepared the meat last night with a pound of ground beef and a pound of ground lamb mixed up with some spices and onions in a food processor. I then baked it loaf style and compressed it with another pan. Then I wrapped it up and stuck it in the refrigerator overnight. The anticipation was real!

When I got home, I broke out the loaf and sliced it into thin strips.

I melted some butter in a pan and threw some of the slices in.

I cooked them until they crisped up nicely. The aromas that were emitted from this pan were heavenly. It made me feel like I was back at Aladdin Cafe. Ahhhh, I couldn't wait!!

While these were cooking, we whipped up some sort of tzatziki sauce.

We strained some yogurt, chopped up and strained a cucumber, pressed a couple garlic cloves, added some olive oil and vinegar and mixed it all up.

I'll admit that not everything in this meal was homemade. One simply cannot eat gyro meat without pita naan and hummus, and we neither had the time nor the know how to make either. So, on the way home today, we picked up a little something...

Yes, it's true. We picked up some pita naan and hummus from Aladdin Cafe. But we made the meat and tzatziki sauce! That counts for something!

To supplement our Greek affair, we had some watermelon and sweet corn. Ya gotta throw in a little 'Murica here and there!

It was just a dinner filled with glorious sights.

I recreated my classic Aladdin Cafe dream bite (although this one included the tzatziki sauce).

I'm not usually a big fan of tzatziki sauce, but this I enjoyed. I also recreated my simple meat and hummus combination.

And finally, when we were almost out of pita naan, I decided to try a piece with just butter, because butter and because why not???

It was, as you can expect, very good. I then grabbed another piece of pita naan, slathered some more butter on it, then put some meat on there, all covered in hummus. This was the new dream bite.

All in all, it was a success. Everything I read about making homemade gyro meat went on and on about getting the right texture and how hard that was. Well, I got the right texture! I will admit that our meat had noticeably less flavor than that of Aladdin Cafe, but I mostly attribute this to the thinness of the slices. Had I sliced them a little thicker, they likely would have been juicier and more flavorful. This is purely speculation, but it also means that I'll have to make this again soon! Pretty soon I'll be a gyro meat extraordinaire!