Meatballs: A Love Story

04/29/2010

This week has been a massive failure, culinarily speaking.  I think I ate out half the week, with the exception of last night, when Josh made Kraft Mac for us for dinner because I was too lightheaded to do anything but fall asleep after a very long day at work during which I ran around a lot and only actually ate one chocolate-banana smoothie and four homemade oreos.

These meatballs were the one gastronomical high point of my week, and that’s sad.  The meatballs aren’t sad; they’re fantastic.  What’s sad is that I have yet to follow them up with anything as delicious.  To make it up to you, and to my poor, poor belly, I think I will make some barbecue this weekend and post all the mouth-watering photos that I can.  That’s my gift to you.  Or it will be.  If I do it.

Anyway, I can’t really remember but I’m pretty sure I made these on Monday, before my week went completely to crap.  I really love meatballs.  I’m intrigued by them.  Not the “Why the hell would you do that?” kind of fascination that I have with meatloaf, oddly enough, but a simple curious adoration (I’ll do anything for meatballs but I won’t do that?).  In fact, if you recall, my previous iteration of this blog was chickenmeatballs.wordpress.com.  It’s one of my food goals to master the art of meatball making (along with icing, pulled pork, chocolate turtles, pancakes, biscuits and a few thousand other things—luckily, I think I’ve got the chocolate chip cookie down).  Well, this week I think I moved a tiny bit closer to my goal of meatball perfection.  Read the rest of this entry »

Monday Night Pantry Pasta Pretty Damn Quick

04/20/2010

uh yes please

I picked out glasses yesterday afternoon.  Prescription sunglasses, to be precise.  I can’t really tell you what they look like though.  I’m not even really sure.  That’s the problem with having to try on glasses when you don’t wear contacts and are otherwise mostly blind.  But hey, in about 3-4 weeks when they come in, maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised!  Or horrified.  We’ll see.  Ha.  We’ll see.  Get it?  Yeah.

So after that, I walked down to Kerrytown and waited for Josh to pick me up.  It’s after five at this point.  Then we have to go get the dog because yes, my dog goes to doggy daycare once a week so he can run around and socialize like the wild beast that he is.  Of course, to get him, we have to drive through all the construction down on Main Street by Stadium and then once we’ve got him, we have to stop at the bank.  And then drive through rush-hour traffic through town because there’s no way we’re hitting I-94 at this hour and by the time we get home, settled, mail on the table, shoes off the feet, bathroom break taken care of, dog fed, etc, etc, etc, we’re looking at almost 7pm and time to make dinner and I’m starving.  I also have a lot of freelance work to do—videos to edit, DVDs to burn, that sort of thing–and don’t want to be on my feet all night cooking.  And then there’s that nagging little voice that says, “Screw cooking; order a pizza from Aubree’s.  With breadsticks.  Don’t forget my breadsticks.” Read the rest of this entry »

Go-Go-Gadget Goulash!

03/20/2010

Ah, Michigan in the spring.  This week was day after day of 65 degree weather with full sun and, thanks to Daylight Savings Time, nice long lit evenings.  We grilled.  We lounged.  We ate out at cafe sidewalks.  We…did yardwork.  It was beautiful.  It was gorgeous.  It was—short lived.  Today’s forecast?  Rain and a high of 44.  Tomorrow?  Gulp.  Snow.  Sigh.

So even though I’m positively itching (that might be the bug bites from the yardwork) to hop on the grilling bandwagon and get my yippy-ki-yay on, I went back to my cold-weather friend, the slowcooker, and decided to try a new recipe…for goulash.

Am I the only person who, when they hear the word “goulash,” immediately thinks of Gargamel from the Smurfs?  No, you do it too?  Ok, good.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had a proper “goulash,” which is a stew usually made of beef, onions, vegetables, and paprika.  Interestingly, Wikipedia tells me that the word stems from the Hungarian word for cattle herdsmen.  Ha!  It’s like Hungarian Cowboy Stew.  Read the rest of this entry »

Pomegranate-braised ancho-chocolate beef: it's what's for dinner. And maybe dessert. No, just dinner. Maybe dessert.

11/29/2009

I got a notice that POM Wonderful was having a recipe contest and I thought, “Self, we’ve never entered a recipe contest before. We should give it a shot.”  Self said, “We’ll never win.”  And I replied, “Way to be defeatist, Self.  The point is that it’s an excuse to be creative.”  Self: “Since when do we need an excuse?”  Me: “Since you started screwing with my chi.”  Self: “Oh okay.”  So we shook on it.  Mentally.

So now that Self and I were in agreement (which happens much less often than you might imagine), I started thinking about various winter meals we could make with pomegranate.  I considered roasting a chicken basted with a pomegranate compound butter.  Iactually did that one, too.  It wasn’t bad.  But it didn’t make me go, “Mmmmmmmmmmmm” with my head tilted back and my mouth wide open slouched in a chair like Homer Simpson.  I also thought about stuffing a pork tenderloin with spinach and goat cheese and cooking it in a pomegranate glaze.  Haven’t done that yet…but probably will, because thinking about it now has me drooling a little bit, I’ll admit it. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a Wocket in My Pizza Pocket

10/05/2009

You know, I tried really hard to think of a witty lead in for this blog post, but I’ve got nothing.  I blame it on Monday.  We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.  [Edit: Thankfully, Sophia saved me with a hilarious new title that you can read above.]

But anyway, tonight we made calzones. Partly out of a want of pizza on my part, partly out of a guiltiness that I pasted a calzone recipe into my Evernote months ago and had yet to get around to making it, and partly because Busch’s has ground sirloin on sale. I figured, heck, at home we already had cheese, peppers, onions, garlic, spinach and mushrooms and tomatoes…all we had to do is pick up the beef and some pizza dough.  AND we–and by “we” I mean “I”–could make enough for tonight and tomorrow’s lunch.  Genius.  Of course, once at the store, a few other items got added to the list, mostly due to Josh’s deep-seated love for pepperoni and pizza sauce.  And then it came down to the crust.

What to use?

I mean, at this point, I’m feeling too lazy to make my own pizza crust.  And by “this point,” I mean “I am always too lazy to make my own pizza crust.”  But Busch’s only had (that I know of) frozen pizza crusts, and we didn’t want to wait for a dough ball to thaw.  Nor did we really trust the canned Pillsbury pizza crust (don’t get me wrong–I am not a food snob (much) and and I have made more than my share of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls, biscuits and donuts but pizza dough?  In a can?   For some reason I won’t go that far).  And we didn’t want to venture to another store to get fresh pizza dough.  So I did the only reasonable thing: I picked up a couple of pie crusts.  Pillsbury.  :-)   My reluctance to embrace pizza-in-a-can also does not extend to ready-made-roll-out-pie crusts.  I’m a complex creature.  There’s no point in trying to figure it out. Read the rest of this entry »

Fall’s First Meatloaf

09/07/2009

Happy Labor Day!

Well, there it goes.  The end of my summer.  Not with a bang.  Not really a whimper.  More of an “Ehhhhh I don’t wanna.”    Or a “Meh.”  A sullen “meh” though, not one of those nonchalant “I just don’t care” mehs.  Not here.

But instead of doing a giant barbecue (mmm barbecue) as a last hurrah to the last day of summer, I instead decided to put my best foot forward into fall with a dinner meal inspired by fall colors and fall comfort food: meatloaf.

All right, I’ll be honest.  I had my first slice of meatloaf about two years ago.  Seriously.  I’d never had it before that.  I always figured it was because my mom was a vegetarian, and while she made many meat dishes for the rest of us omnivores, why mold raw meat if you don’t have to?  Surprisingly, this was all apparently new to my mom, who is convinced that she made us meatloaf when we were kids.  In fact, when I told her she didn’t, she was absolutely taken aback and incensed and insisted on calling my sister to verify that she made meatloaf.  It went something like this:

Mom: What?  I made you guys meatloaf all the time.  Don’t you remember?  I used to put three strips of bacon across the top.
Me: Uh, no mom, I don’t know who you made that for, but it wasn’t us.
Josh: stifling a laugh
Mom: Well we’ll see what your sister says about this.  Picks up phone, dials.  Arica, didn’t I make you guys meatloaf when you were kids? Brief pause WHADDYA MEAN “NO?!” Read the rest of this entry »

At the kofta, kofta cabana…

08/25/2009

Josh and I are trying a new thing this month: not spending half our take home pay in food costs.  Radical, I know.  Especially when there’s only two of us.  Well, and Winston, but he doesn’t get people food, much to his dismay.  But between eating out fairly often (especially lunches during the work week, Sunday breakfasts at Afternoon Delight or Mark’s Midtown Coney Island and the frequent dinner out alone or with friends) and shopping at some not-so-wallet-friendly places just because they happen to be right across the street (coughwholefoodscough) and have an excellent meat counter, we do spend an inordinate amount of money on food.  That and we tend to not eat leftovers, and we buy expensive ingredients because well…we’re foodies.  We like to make and cook food of various types, and we get bored easily so…well, you can see how it lands us into trouble.

Where was I going with this?  Oh yeah.  Economizing.  Busch’s has ground sirloin on sale!  I adore ground sirloin.  So we bought a family pack of the stuff because hey, we eat beef pretty often (can you tell?), we have a ton of plastic baggies AND we have one of the greatest kitchen tools ever–a countertop scale.  We are in business.

And because I had this lovely pack of ground beef, I decided to try something new that would also utilize mostly ingredients I already had in the cupboards: beef kofta.

Kofta, or kefta, are basically Middle Eastern/South Asian meatballs which have variations numbering in the hundreds.  Often you’ll see them shaped like sausages and grilled on sticks.  That’s more or less what I was going for here.  Emboldened by the fact that kofta can be so varied, I didn’t worry about whether it’s truly authentic (I can assure you it’s not) and just focused on making something tasty, easy and quick.

Which brings us, finally, to the recipe. Read the rest of this entry »

BBQ 2: Delicious Boogaloo

08/20/2009

Sure we just had barbecue last night and perhaps if we were lesser mortals, we’d avoid doing some version of barbecue tonight.  Ha.  Right.  We’re not average mortals.  We’re superheroes.  Wonder Twin powers, activate!  Form of…bbq beef sandwiches!

Just kidding.  Maybe.

Anyway, I put it to Josh to decide what we were having for dinner tonight, since I decided the last few times.  He suggested pasta.  Mmm.  Eh.  We do pasta a lot. But it made me think of meatballs, so I countered with “meatball sandwiches.”  And then he countered with an absolutely brililant idea–why don’t we get the butcher to thinly slice a pound of roast for us and makes barbecue beef sandwiches like I get at Pizza House? I figured sure, it would be like the cheese steaks we sometimes make, but with barbecue sauce.  Delicious.

So we did.  If you’ve never taken full advantage of having a grocery store nearby with a real butcher in it, you should.  They’re trained to do it, they can do it quickly, and they really don’t mind.  Talk to them.  They have ideas, they know what’s good—and ours today clued us in on an upcoming porkchop sale this weekend…faaaabulous.  Anyway, we asked him to just measure us out a pound of one of their great looking chuck roasts and slice it paper thin. Voila!  Perfect sandwich meat.  Time to get home and get cooking. Read the rest of this entry »

Coconut Beef

07/29/2009

Like most things I cook, I didn’t have a recipe for this per se.  I just threw in flavors that I enjoyed in the estimated quantities below and I have to tell you, my apartment now smells fantastic.  The cinnamon, cumin and coconut are just wafting through the air and even though I was making this for tomorrow’s lunch, I was so tempted to just eat it all right then and there while standing at the stove.  To go with it, I cooked up some couscous (the best 5 minute food there is) with chicken stock and dried rosemary.  Josh is out of town, so I more or less engineered this recipe to feed just myself.  It’d be very easy to increase the recipe by however many people you’d like to feed.

Read the rest of this entry »

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