I first heard of shawarma from Chris Costello on IRC. It seems to be a variant of Gyros, and it's currently fashionable in the USA. I've never tasted it myself.
This gives me a bit of a problem, of course: how do I find a good recipe, and how do I know when I have got it right? I started with Google and came up with three recipes which might give me an idea: inmamaskitchen.com, recipesource.com and classicfoodsltd.com. None of them looked overly authentic, and they differ in ways that suggest that (as usual) the quantities are all wrong. In the end, I came up with the following starting point:
| 100 ml | yoghurt | 1 |
| 50 ml | vinegar | 1 |
| 50 ml | lemon juice | 1 |
| 115 g | onion, minced | 1 |
| 3 g | salt | 1 |
| 0.7 g | black pepper | 1 |
| 0.7 g | chili powder (“cayenne pepper”) | 1 |
| 0.2 g | nutmeg, grated | 1 |
| 10 g | garlic (3 good cloves) | 1 |
| 1.0 g | cinnamon, powdered | 1 |
| 0.5 g | cardamom seeds | 1 |
| 400 g | lamb topside, cut into thin strips | 2 |