Healthy Lamb Lettuce Wrap Recipe with Moroccan Spices | Paleo (2024)

These healthy lettuce wraps are brought to you by my friends at Superior Farms. Thank you as always for supporting the companies that make this site (and my lamb cravings) possible.

My first trip to Morocco was both a transformative and traumatic experience.

If you’ve read The Wellness Project book and made it to the Eater’s Digest chapter you’ll know about the bad part. But today let’s focus on the transformative.

The trip was my college graduation gift from my mother, who had spent a good chunk of her twenties living in Morocco.

It had been over a decade since she’d been back to visit friends, and as my generous reward for making it through four years of poli-sci essays and beer pong, she took me along for two weeks of gorging on cumin-scented lamb, hiking through the Atlas Mountains, and haggling for ethnic furnishings for my first New York City apartment.

While the embroidered floor pillows have stuck with me through three moves, and the photo of me riding a donkey down a particularly harrowing stretch of mountain remains one of my favorites, there’s probably no memory that’s stuck with me more than the food.

Though I’d eaten lamb before, it was the first time I had really experienced its depth of flavor. The meat was tender, and often-times pleasantly gamey from having grazed in nearby pastures. When I got home, I started seeking it out more often at the market. And since I was operating on a first-year-in-the-real-world salary, in order to experiment with it on a budget, I usually came home with a package of ground meat instead of the pricier racks.

Lamb burgers have always been a regular on my rotation, especially when trying to elevate a basic meaty comfort food. So when I started thinking about ways to get more creative with ground lamb, I thought a Moroccan-style lettuce wrap would be the perfect marriage in healthy hedonist heaven.

This healthy lettuce wrap recipe is a similar concept to a Thai larb, but using the Moroccan spice blend Ras El Hanout. If you don’t want to add another jar to your rack (trust me, I get it), you can make something similar yourself by combining turmeric, cumin and cinnamon. The browned meat gets jazzed up further with onion, garlic, harissa (a Moroccan red pepper paste) and some lemon juice.

The lamb itself was sourced by my friends at Superior Farms, who work with family farmers across the country. What I love about the company is that they prioritize sustainable practices; their flocks are set to pasture on grasslands and treated humanely. Some graze on vineyards to reduce heavy equipment while replenishing nutrients and microbes in the soil. Others work on regenerative grazing on public lands to prevent fires and support native plant growth. And their California facility even uses wind and solar power to make up for more than 90% of their energy use.

The recipe itself is gluten-free (like most Moroccan food), Whole30-friendly, Paleo, and most important for summer: fast AF. You can serve it as an appetizer or as a light main course, which is the way Charlie and I inhaled it the other day, drizzled with a generous amount of lemon-mint aioli.

From one healthy hedonist, to another,

Xoxo
Phoebe

These healthy lettuce wraps are brought to you by my friends at Superior Farms. Thank you as always for supporting the companies that make this site (and my lamb cravings) possible.