I never take much of an interest in quotidian cooking tasks, but every once in a while I like to splash out on something really impressive. It has to be something difficult, labor-intensive — artisanal, almost. The former owner of our house was a caterer, and she bequeathed to us a fantastically ugly but large and functional kitchen with a commercial range, electric oven, indoor grill, and lots of space—perfect for making big complicated meals. Italian wedding soup is my reigning piece de resistance. The broth has to sit overnight so the fat can be skimmed off. All those tiny little meatballs have to be made by hand. And it…is…good.

So the urge was coming upon me last weekend, and Husband had already vetoed (again) my suggestion to make a timpano, when I happened upon an old episode of Julia Child on PBS. Julia was cooking a chicken on a spit, and quite a production it was. She trussed that bird six ways from Tuesday, and then she demonstrated two different kinds of rotisseries, one oven-based and another free-standing. The recipe fit my cooking jones perfectly: it was needlessly complicated and involved gadgetry.

Now, it just so happened that Husband had a duck in the fridge. “Honey, do you think we could run out and buy a rotisserie?” I asked.

“I think we already have one,” he said. Sure enough, I looked in the cabinet that he directed me to and found a complete rotisserie set-up with a stand that fit over the grill, a set of skewers, and a little motor to turn the thing. Unfortunately, the motor was broken. And somehow finding an exact replacement for the motor seemed kind of daunting, so I decided to make kibbeh instead.

Kibbeh is one of the recipes, like wedding soup, that I stole from my aunts. They are Italian but grew up in an area with a number of Syrian immigrants and so have some great Middle Eastern dishes in their repetoire. Kibbeh is made with ground lamb or beef, pine nuts, bulgur wheat, and spices. There are three types of kibbeh: raw, baked, and deep-fried. I’ve never had raw kibbeh, although Husband makes a mean steak tartare and, if it’s anything similar, I’m sure raw kibbeh is delicious. But I can tell you that if there’s a choice between baked and fried, all right-thinking people choose fried. Fried kibbeh is made in the form of footballs, with a shell of meat and wheat stuffed with more meat and pine nuts. You dip them in a yogurt sauce made with lemon, garlic, olive oil, and a little mint: to die for.

In days of yore I probably would have learned these recipes in my aunts’ kitchen, but now that the family is no longer co-located I call them on the phone and try mightily to worm the details out of them. It’s hard because they cook by muscle memory and can’t always recite exact quantities or even a precise list of ingredients. You’d think e-mail would be a perfect medium for transmitting recipes, but my aunts are a bit shy of the internets. One of my aunts even has Web-TV. Remember that? When everyone was going to surf through their televisions? There are like ten subscribers left, and she is one of them. When I visited her last year, I tried to use it to send an e-mail and almost tore my hair out. Let’s just say they haven’t worked out all the kinks in adapting a web browser to a TV screen.

And I have not yet worked out all the kinks in my kibbeh recipe, as the resulting footballs were nowhere as good as Aunt Donna’s. For that reason, I don’t want to repeat the recipe here, because obviously the quantities are a bit off. But if you’re interested in making kibbeh, try this and view my little video — my Julia Child moment — that shows how to make the shells and stuff them with the filling. I’ve edited out the audio of me calling to Husband, “Don’t show my face!” Take some time to admire the white plastic countertops, the gray laminate cabinets, and the black-and-white “tile look” linoleum in the kitchen.

Here is the finished product. Deep fried footballs — doesn’t sound or even look appetizing, but it’s definitely one of my favorite meals.