meatballs and bolognese

Man, I have been craving meatballs for WEEKS. I get this way more often than not about meals, I have found, just completely fixated on a dish until I'm incapable of considering anything else for dinner. It always starts slight at first, a fleeting idea or recipe photo I glanced at peripherally on a sidebar as I scrolled down a web page, oozing with cheese or sauce or seared meat, some bite overheard in coworker conversation or a lunch hour odor wafting out of who knows what cubicle or industrial restaurant vents sensed from the highway in the evening as I commute homeward.

Meatballs, baby. I gotta have them.

After hitting the gym last night, as we all walk out to the car, sweaty and woozy, Fish and I chat about dinner (a bit breathlessly on my end, I'll admit):

"I'm hungry, Mom. What's for dinner?"
"Meatballs, baby! And zucchini!"
"With pasta?"
"Sure, I'll make you some pasta, it'll go nice with the red meat sauce I froze forever ago."
"I want spinach alfredo."
"We're having meatballs and bolognese tonight, baby. We can have that with chicken tomorrow night."
"We could have both?"
"NO. YOU CAN EAT THE MEATBALLS AND RED SAUCE I AIN'T YO SHORT ORDER CHEF."
*giggling* "um, okay, that sounds good too."

Meatballs, it is!

Meatballs are incredibly easy to make, and take two seconds. Instead of making mine with ground beef, I use a blend of pork and turkey, which works nicely and is half the price per pound. I've been lucky and have routinely found marked down ground pork, which I mix with turkey and freeze for later use.


When it's meatball time, I thaw out the meat and mix it up with some breadcrumbs, egg, salt and pepper, and some sriracha. Sometimes parmesan, it depends on the mood I'm in. I used the rest of my goat cheese in this batch, because why not?

I love squishing the mix with my hands to mix it all up, something about incorporating all the ingredients this way is incredibly satisfying for me. If you're offput by handling raw meat with your fingers (understandable), just use a spoon, it's all good, just mix it all up any way you're comfortable with.

At one point, I would shape my meat into curse words and post photos of it on Facebook, cracking up my friends list. Dirty meat swears! I think I prefer meal prep to flesh fonts, though.

Once the meat mix is fully incorporated, I pull off golf ball-sized wads of meat and roll it into a ball in my palms and set on a tray. Once all the meat is balled up, I have a pyramid of raw meat spheres ready for frying. My poor puppy stares at the meat mound, softly crying for a taste. Nope! I give him cooked bites later on, though.

I fried the meatballs close together in my large cast iron. I used lard for these, it was left over from the latkes the night before, but you can use cooking oil or shortening, whatever you have on hand.

Test your oil temp by tossing in a tiny fleck of flesh into the pan. If it bubbles like crazy, your pan's ready to load full of meat. Pack the meatballs closely and wait a few minutes for the bottoms to brown, then flip and brown the other side before removing from the oil.

I place my crispy meatballs on a cookie sheet, then stick them in the oven to finish, just in case the insides are still a bit raw. I prefer this method, as I tend to overcook my meat to be safe, and the outsides burn and taste unpleasant. Once they firm up a bit more in the oven, I drop them all in a pot of bolognese I had simmering on my stove. Stir enough to cover the balls in the sauce, but not so vigorous that they break apart. Simmer these on low for up to an hour. I left mine in the sauce as I fried up some zucchini fritters, which were tasty, thought I could have squeezed more moisture out of the veg before mixing and frying.

I made the bolognese  forever ago, when I first got back into town from my last Springfield trip. I had meant to make it while I was on vacation, but I got caught up making all the other foods, and time sort of slipped away from me, as it does, you know. Never got my Andy's frozen custard, either, or my Gem of India food. Those spots are at the top of my list, restaurant-wise, when I visit next year, and are in the same relative direction, too!

The sauce is easy enough, but takes forever to simmer on the stove. It freezes beautifully, as you can tell, though I recommend freezing in plastic bags instead of glass, as thawing it out is worlds easier that way, and the bags thin out and are easier to stack in the freezer, freeing up much needed cold space. I need a deep freezer in my garage, it's become clear to me now. My freezer space is so tight, I have considered storing broth and meat in my dad's freezer across the street. I've had to hold off on making broth, too. You know how I love making broth. What a tragedy. Such is life!

Process some onion, celery, garlic and onion until it's paste-like, then stick in a stock pot with some oil and salt and brown for almost a half hour. All the moisture will evaporate and the veg will start to smell incredible. Heat unlocks that hidden fragrance in vegetables, so don't rush this step, let all the smells seep out of the paste and release into the pan. Oh my god, so fragrant and flavorful.

Add three pounds of ground beef (and yes, I did buy ground beef for this! It was the last time I've bought it, actually, specifically for this sauce) and brown another 20m or so. We're talking hella brown, very dark brown. Throw a couple cups of tomato paste in here and cook a few minutes before pouring an entire bottle of red wine in the pot. Oh yes, y'all. Let me tell you how liberating it is to uncork a bottle of red and just pour every drop of it into a pot. It's outright anarchy in this piece!

Add water until the meat is covered, and add some bay leaves and sprigs of thyme. Bring the pot to a boil then simmer for four hours. FOUR, dude. Salt the sauce and add more water a couple cups at a time as the sauce simmers. Over the next few hours, check your sauce for liquid and seasoning as it reduces. It's impossible to add too much liquid, so don't fret if you drown it, it will evaporate out. Omitting this reduce-refill step risks scalding your sauce, which will suck so much for you, as blackened tomato sauce SUCKS and tastes like FAILURE AND IMPATIENCE. Don't make amateurish mistakes, you're better than that. You deserve more, buddy! Reduce and refill and salt!

After a few hours, you will have your final sauce: thick and beefy with a deep flavor reminiscent of a pasta plate at some fancy italian joint (sans fennel, who would ever want their meat sauce to taste like black licorice?). I froze my sauce in glass jars, and still have so much left! I recommend freezing it in smaller plastic bags, then laying these on a baking sheet and freezing flat. Once frozen, you can store them upright to save space. When starving, boil noodles and make meatballs and toss them in the thawed out sauce. Couldn't be easier!

Most of my sauces are admittedly less elaborate than this, but I enjoy effort-requisite recipes lately, and will make this sauce a staple for my freezer. Why pay two or three bucks per jar of mass produced sauce when you can whip up more product with a higher quality for less financial investment? It's a trade-off, for sure, but I have this pseudo-tic lately about corporate food that increased in severity each day.

I'm not an evangelical wad about home cooking, I just very deeply identify with a DIY philosophy, and find it incredibly important to make food myself instead of buying it premade. As a result, my grocery cart is usually full of produce, canned tomatoes and chilies, meat and seasonings (like Worcestershire). Why buy a premade precursor when I can make it at home?

Every "staple" I can make myself feels like an achievement to me. Like an arsenal of edible how-tos that I can write about and share with you. It minimizes the individual items that make up all that I eat and prepare, and builds up my understanding of culinary components to an increasingly encyclopedic level. It's like unlocking the potential of all cuisine via identifying the bare minimum ingredients involved in each step, which are surprisingly conserved across the ethnic board. Reminds me of my genetics class, to be totally honest with you. Pursuing the shared bare minimum of my pantry, and all that.

My fantasy is to have such a firm grip on multicultural cuisine prep, to expose myself to it to such an extent that I can one day look up a recipe, break each component down, go into my kitchen, and have every necessary prep item on hand. That level of casual preparedness excites the shit outta me, I must admit! Can you even imagine?

...yeah, you can, can't you?