Don't ask me why exactly, but it seems oddly appropriate that one of my first post-hiatus recipe recaps is basically about how I totally failed at recreating something seemingly simple. Probably a sign that Sunday is a night for either takeout or frozen pizza, and not something as ambitious as meatballs, especially when the ground beef is frozen solid, it's already 6pm, and you have two hungry, grumpy boys waiting to be fed.
But of course I thought to myself I've been cooking up a storm lately. Meatballs? From a recipe that I've made before? Child's play.
So off to a very crowded Harris Teeter I went with one of the aforementioned grumpsters (whom I love dearly, and who would also admit that he was grumpy, so I'm not exactly telling tales out of school here). We foraged for supplies. He talked me out of taking the time to make sauce from scratch. We braved the epic lines. I did my best to whip up dozens of meatballs in record speed.
We ended up eating this:
Note: grumpy, hungry boys, I learned, will eat either in mere seconds. So don't worry if you're as impatient and screw-up prone as me.
But of course I thought to myself I've been cooking up a storm lately. Meatballs? From a recipe that I've made before? Child's play.
So off to a very crowded Harris Teeter I went with one of the aforementioned grumpsters (whom I love dearly, and who would also admit that he was grumpy, so I'm not exactly telling tales out of school here). We foraged for supplies. He talked me out of taking the time to make sauce from scratch. We braved the epic lines. I did my best to whip up dozens of meatballs in record speed.
We ended up eating this:
Do you see any meatballs? No, you do not. See, this overly confident girl got a little too frenzied in the kitchen (and some red wine on an empty stomach may also be to blame), and didn't fully braise the meatballs before they cooked in the store-bought sauce (note that I'm still shuddering at my lack of homemade sauce). So instead of being appropriately firm, the meatballs fell apart the minute you so much as touched them. Instead of trying to salvage them, I crushed them all up, and we had meat sauce instead of meatballs.
However, I can still wholeheartedly recommend this recipe, including the whole "make your own sauce" bit, because I whipped it up on Election Night back in November for sustenance as we watched the results trickle in. I even forgot to add the egg to the meatball mixture that time, and they held up fine. So, follow the instructions and braise those babies. If you do, you'll get something much more like this:
Note: grumpy, hungry boys, I learned, will eat either in mere seconds. So don't worry if you're as impatient and screw-up prone as me.
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