Shrinking Chef's Internationally Famous Meatballs

I might've mentioned one or two ... hundred ... times that I live in an onion-free zone. When I was in college, I was also not much of an onion lover. My then-fiance didn't eat onions, and two of my best friends (one of whom I lived with for a year) are allergic. Thus, I was always on the hunt for a good onionless recipe. I figured I would just never be able to make meatballs. But then I found it, written right there on the Rosetta Stone. Or maybe it was allrecipes.com, who knows. At any rate, I tinkered with it until it was perfect.

As for the international fame, it's totally legit. One of my BFFs is from England, and he loves them.

One last note before we jump right in: In this recipe, I'm preparing a DOUBLE BATCH. I like to make up a metric crap-load of bawls and freeze them while still raw. When you're ready to eat them, you just toss them in a pot of spaghetti sauce, bring to a boil, cover, and let simmer. Simmer an hour from frozen, or 40 minutes from thawed. Or you could put the frozen bawls in a crockpot on low before you go to work, and voila! Yummy meatballs when you return.

Let's see what we've got here.

Breadcrumbs, parsley flakes, black pepper, garlic powder, parmesan cheese, eggs, ground pork, lean ground beef. Pretend the salt's not there, that was a mistake.

Note: I hate ground pork, and for years I made this stuff with just ground beef. It was awesome in the all-beef form, but once I had to use up some ground pork I had laying around, so I tried a 50/50 mix just for funsies. I'm not too proud to admit that I was wrong, wrong, wrong about the pork. It takes the meatballs to a nirvana-like state of being. They're not too porky, I promise. But if you don't have any dead pig laying around, it'll be great with just cow.


Anyway, throw a pound each of your dead, ground-up animal muscle in a big mixing bowl.



Scramble 2 eggs. Preferably in a fancy little bowl.

I'll give you three guesses what you're gonna do with the eggs.



You always guess!! No fair.



Oh, crucially important step coming up. If you are wearing rings, watches, or bracelets ... REMOVE THEM. Otherwise you wind up picking bits of gristle out from between your prongs.

After you take care of your bling, mix up the egg/meat combo.

You could use a spoon, I suppose, but don't bother. Your hands are going to be all over this stuff before it's done anyway, and vice versa. They're going to get really nasty. It's kind of gross, and that's exactly why I make so many of these at a time!


When it's mixed, it'll look like this.



Awesome. Now add:
2 cups of plain breadcrumbs



a good handful of Parmesan cheese



1/2 tsp of black pepper



a tablespoon(ish) of garlic powder



a big hunk of parsley (2 tablespoons, at least)


4 calling birds, 3 French hens, 2 turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree. Just kidding. Freakin' Christmas carols start earlier every year, don't they?


Aaaaanywho, now your meatballs look something like this ....

... only with parsley. I forgot mine and had to add it at the end; don't tell the Pork Police. Oh, if you're doing all-beef meatballs, you should add a few shakes of salt here. Pork/beef meatballs don't need it.


Now take all the dry ingredients sitting atop the dead animal, and smear them around until they're mixed.

We could've mixed the dry stuff in a separate bowl first, but why dirty another dish??


When it's done, it'll look like so.




Now ...... ATTACK!



Squeeze and knead and squish the stuff until it mixes together. Make sure to flip it over and get the crumbs from the bottom of the bowl.




Keep going until it looks like this.

Now give it a taste, and tinker with the spi..... just kidding! You're going to have to trust me on this one.

Pour some spaghetti sauce in a pot. (Doesn't have to be a stockpot, but it does have to be big!)


Just enough to cover the bottom.




Now, make the balls! PLM took these pictures, since my hands were a little busy. And slimy.


First things first. Turn on some appropriate music. (Tip for Daddio -- right-click it and select "open in new tab" or "open in new window", and it won't take you away from this page.)


Then pinch off some meat.


And roll it between your hands...

just like you used to with Play-Doh!


Ta-da!!!

Kids love making shit like this, so why not put them to work? If you can't boss them around and use them for menial labor, you're just the tallest person living there. Unless you're Auntie P, and then you don't even have that to fall back on.


As you finish the meatballs, go ahead and put them in your pot.



Let's talk for a moment about size, because regardless of what anyone tells you, it really does matter. I personally prefer big balls for spaghetti, medium-sized balls for hoagies, and small ones for soups (although I've never tried these meatballs in a soup, anyway). The ones in the pot are for meatball hoagies. But it's really all about personal preference. So think really hard about how big you like em.


Let's get saucy.

You might need more than one jar, depending.


Crank up the heat until they boil,



then put a lid on em

... and turn the heat down to low.


On the left, I have hoagie meatballs. On the right, big balls for spaghetti.

I had 16 in the pot plus the ones above, so that makes a total of 32 medium-sized meatballs and 12 bigger meatballs from 2 pounds of meats. Not too shabby!

Let them simmer for 40 minutes, giving them the stir every now and then. Be gentle -- save the ball-busting for some other occasion!

Enjoy!!

Technical help!

For anyone who is wondering why these blog posts aren't coming more often, I thought I'd share this small fact about the potato soup blog:

It took me nearly an hour to upload the pictures and edit the blog post.

That's not including the time it took to write it out, or take the pictures, or upload the pictures to my computer, or edit the photos. Simply the amount of time I had to spend at the computer to upload the pics. I have to email the pictures to my blog, and for some reason it only lets me send 3, maaaaaybe 4 photos at a time; if I try to send more, the email is returned to me b/c the file is too big. I have no idea why I can take so few pictures; when I did my first few, I could upload 6 or 7 photos at a time, so it was no sweat. Now it takes a few minutes to send each email, and then I have to cut/paste the pictures from the emails into the blog. And then I mess with the spacing and font and all that jazz.

Long story short, if anyone knows a better blogging site for picture uploading, I'd love to hear about it! Right now each post takes me almost 2 hours from start to finish.

Thanks!

Potato-Leek Soup

This Spring, Picky Library Man and I purchased a share of the crops of a group of local farmers. Every week I pick up a bag of produce like a good little hippie, and every week it's a surprise. Last week I got, among other things, leeks. I know exactly one leek recipe: potato soup! I'm probably less than ¼ Irish, but to see the way I eat you'd think I was a redheaded Dubliner named Erin O'Connor. Before I go into a Bubba-like list of all the ways I like to eat potatoes, why don't we just make the thing?

First things first:

That's thyme, white pepper, parsley, black pepper, salt, butter, milk, water, chicken broth, bacon, onion, leeks, and potatoes (I like red potatoes, but you could also use Russet or Yukon Gold).

First, peel about 2.5 (half a bag) of potatoes. If you like your soup really chunky, you can do more. No biggie. These are pretty big potatoes, so I cut them in half, then I cut each half like so:

Chuck your potatoes in a medium-sized pot and drown them.

Salt the water. Don't worry about overdoing it, b/c it's completely impossible. This is how much I used, and I ended up adding WAAAAAAY more later. So have at it.

Cover that sumbitch up and turn up the heat on those suckers to med-high. They've got to cook for awhile.

Now I want you to take your bacon out of the package, and cut the pack in half.

Put half of it in a Ziploc bag and save it for later. Then hack up the other half into strips about half an inch wide. (You could do it one strip at a time … if you like wasting time.)

Just throw away that last bit that's all fat. You'll have plenty of bacon grease without it.

Dead pig never looked so good.

Now it's time to make that pork fry. Turn the burner on to medium heat, and break up the pieces of bacon into a stockpot. Here's how I do it. Put your thumb under the ridge and flick it in. Once you get the hang of it, you can do it two-handed.

While that's frying, chop up the most frightening thing in Picky Library Man's life.

Duh duh DUUUUHHHH!!!!! Onion. Oh, the horror. Now, if I didn't live with a neurotic onion-hater, I would dice this up. But I do. So I cut it into rings so that I can have my onion and PLM can easily pick them out.

After you're done, you should probably stir up your bacon. Then take your leek and chop off its crew cut.

Peel off the slimy skin.

Then chop it up like so – the white and light green parts. Chop up two leeks.

Awesome, now check your bacon. When it's still looking a little underdone...

Drain out some of the bacon grease, but for the love of god, make sure the bowl isn't meltable. But leave a few tablespoons in the pot.

Fish the renegade bacon chunks out of the bowl of grease. Either toss it back in the pot or munch on it. You're the chef, you deserve it!

Now add in your onion and leeks.

Stir the onion and leeks around and try to break them up. The leeks will get easier to break up as they soften. Sautee until the onions are soft and just starting to turn brown.

Add in a quart of milk. I used 2%, but I'm sure whole would also be delightful. Skim milk in potato soup is an unholy sin.

Just in case it's been too long since you learned this, 1 quart = 4 cups.

Now add in a quart of water. (Again … that's 4 cups. I know what you're thinking – why can't we use the metric system?? So much easier.)

And next, ¼ cup of clucker juice.

Now, add in some salt. I wound up putting twice this much in and it still needed more when it was done. So really, it's hard to overdo it. Potatoes soak up a lot of salt! I'd do AT LEAST 2 Tbsp.

Next add your black pepper and white pepper, and turn up your heat to medium-high.

Now, I want you to get the broth hot, but don't let it boil. See how it's just starting to think about bubbling? It's saying, "Don't tease, baby."

But oh yeah, we're gonna tease it.

Sadly this is the point at which my camera died, so there are no more pictures. Right around this time, my potatoes were done. You can tell by sticking a fork in them – if the fork slides through easily, they're done. Anyway, drain the potatoes and let them sit on a cool surface until we're ready for them.

Next we're going to make a roux! If you've never made one, you're in for a treat. People will be hella impressed over your skills, b/c roux are often used in French cooking. But we're trashy, and just using it to thicken our soup. Melt a stick of butter in a small saucepan or skillet over medium heat and then add in ½ cup of flour all at once. Mix with a whisk until it's incorporated, and keep it hot hot hot, mixing continuously, for 1 minute. It should be pasty and gross looking – don't worry, that's normal. Don't let food snobs give you anxiety over how you're making your roux, it's perfect for this soup, trust me.

Anyway, after a minute of mixing it, stir it slowly into your pot of hot broth. Then add in your potatoes and about 2 tablespoons (total) of some combination of parsley and/or thyme. (I like more parsley than thyme … but make it to your preference.) Put a lid on it, reduce the heat to low, simma down now for about 45 minutes.

Then, taste your broth – does it need more salt or pepper? Tinker to your heart's content! Then plop some in a bowl and garnish with some shredded Colby.

MMmmmmmmmmmm …… potato soup…….