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Invalid meatballs

I’m currently in Edinburgh, helping out a friend who’s recently had an operation. Part of my plan for the week has been to get her healing up by cooking things which are tasty and full of good things; we’ve been breakfasting on yoghurt, blueberries and raw almonds; drinking unsweetened cranberry juice diluted with fizzy water; chomping our way through antioxidant-dense sweet potatoes – I don’t think I’ve ever consumed so many vitamins in such a short period before.

I made these meatballs a couple of evenings ago, when the extremely lovely Marsha Klein came round to visit us for dinner and conversation about general anaesthetic. The wounded GSE is, I have noticed, not so keen on vegetables on their own, so I hid a great wodge of spinach (niacin, zinc and vitamin-rich stuff, although the iron content is overstated by Popeye) in the meatballs along with some big handfuls of herbs. A bit of stale bread, soaked in milk, makes these really light and toothsome, and the herbs, lemon and coriander seeds give them a lovely aromatic lift. Alongside some buttered, herby rice; green beans stir-fried with garlic and lemon juice; some Greek butter beans and imam bayaldi from the deli; and a hearty dollop of home-made tzatziki (directions below), these went down an absolute treat. To make enough health-giving meatballs to serve four, you’ll need:

Meatballs
500g minced lamb
2 thick slices stale white bread
50ml milk
4 cloves garlic
1 medium onion
100g raw baby spinach leaves
25g each fresh coriander, parsley and mint
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
1 teaspoon paprika
Zest of 1 lemon
1½ teaspoons salt
Several hefty turns of the pepper grinder
Olive oil to fry

Tzatziki
6 inches of cucumber, sliced into 1-inch slivers
6 tablespoons Greek yoghurt
20g fresh mint
1 small clove garlic

Tear the bread into little pieces about the size of your fingernail, and soak them in the milk in a small bowl. Dice the onion and garlic finely, chop the herbs and spinach and grind the coriander seeds in a mortar and pestle. Use your hands to squeeze together the lamb, soaked bread, and all the other meatball ingredients except the olive oil until you have distributed everything evenly – keep squeezing as you go, and you’ll find everything sticks together quite satisfyingly. Roll into meatballs about the size of a ping-pong ball, place them on a plate and refrigerate for at least an hour to allow them to firm up. (This will prevent the meatballs from coming apart while cooking, and helps them keep a nice round shape.)

While the meatballs are cooking, chop the cucumber into inch-long sections and julienne (cut into matchsticks) each of these finely. Crush the garlic clove and chop up the mint, then stir the cucumber, garlic and mint into the yoghurt. Set aside.

When you are ready to cook the meatballs, heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large frying pan and fry them, turning regularly to make sure they are browned all over, for 15 minutes. Serve with a dollop of tzatziki, and feel free to nix all those health benefits by drinking a large glass of red wine while you eat.

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Swedish meatballs

Apologies for the 24-hour disappearance of this blog yesterday and today. I’ve been experiencing increasingly bad problems with Blogger, and am looking at moving to another publisher. Unfortunately, as Gastronomy Domine is published via ftp and doesn’t live on the blogspot.com server, any changeover is made rather fiddlier than I’m happy dealing with – do any readers have any experience or suggestions?

Anyway – on with the food.

Swedish meatballsHere’s a final recipe for your smorgasbord, to go with the Janssons frestelse, the cucumber salad and some gravadlax with dill-mustard sauce. (I may have a post in a couple of weeks on curing your own salmon – currently, though, the fridge is full to bursting, so I ended up buying some pre-cured gravadlax from the supermarket…and very nice it was too.) These meatballs, thanks to a generous (and typically Swedish) amount of cream and milk soaking the breadcrumbs, are deliciously soft and moist. I prefer not to deep fry them (saving on the washing up), but the soft texture does mean that when pan-fried, you are likely to end up with a meatpolyhedron rather than a meatball. Never mind. They still taste lovely.

Because I was serving these with the Janssons frestelse, which has a creamy sauce of its own, I didn’t make a sauce to accompany these meatballs. If you’d like a sauce, just stir a small pot of soured cream and a little salt and pepper into the crusty, meaty, buttery bits left in the frying pan until bubbling, and pour over the meatballs. This is not a particularly beautiful sauce, but it’s exceptionally tasty.

A note on ingredients. I’ve used a mixture of meats here -half pork, and half veal. These days it’s becoming easier to find veal that’s been raised ethically (i.e. not in a crate), but if you are still uncomfortable with it, feel free to substitute the veal with beef.

To make about thirty meatballs for a smorgasboard (if you want less, the cooked meatballs freeze very successfully, or you can just reduce the quantites), you’ll need:

1 cup stale white breadcrumbs
1 cup single (light) cream
1 cup milk
2 beaten eggs
400g minced veal
400g minced pork
1 medium onion, grated
1 heaped teaspoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon salt
Generous amount of freshly ground black pepper
Butter to fry

Mix the breadcrumbs, cream and milk in a small bowl and leave for twenty minutes for the crumbs to absorb the liquid. Use your hands to mix the crumbs, meat, eggs, seasonings and onion together, and divide the mixture into meatballs, shaping by rolling between your palms.

Melt some butter until sizzling in a large frying pan and add the meatballs in batches, being sure not to crowd the pan. Cook for ten minutes, turning regularly, until the meatballs are golden brown and becoming crusty.

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Hearty Chinese meatball soup

This is one of those recipes which feels really, really good for you. A clear chicken stock, flavoured with ginger, rice wine, spring onions and garlic, forms the base for this lovely soup. Meatballs still crisp from frying float in it, deliciously light in texture with their little cubes of water chestnut. Fresh, barely cooked slivers of baby vegetables give the whole dish a lovely sweetness.

If you made the chicken rice on this site, you may have kept some of the leftover broth in the freezer. If your freezer is innocent of chicken broth, you can make some from scratch using:

3 pints water
1 lb chicken wings (usually very cheap from the butcher)
1 inch piece of ginger, whacked with the flat of a knife to squash it a bit
5 cloves of garlic, crushed slightly with the flat of a knife
5 spring onions, tied together in a knot
2 tablespoons light soya sauce
1 wine glass of Chinese rice wine
1 chicken stock cube

Just bring all the ingredients to the boil in a large pan, reduce to a simmer and cook, skimming any froth of the top occasionally, for 30 minutes. Strain the solid ingredients out and discard. The broth can now be used or frozen. (These amounts will make enough for you to use half now for this soup, and freeze half to use later.)

To make the meatballs and finish the soup you’ll need:

1 lb pork mince
1 egg
5 spring onions
5 cloves of garlic
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger
2 tablespoons dark soya sauce
1 tablespoon light soya sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 red chilli
Seasoned flour
1 small can water chestnuts
1 small handful each of baby carrots, mange tout peas and baby sweetcorn

Cut the spring onions, garlic, ginger, chilli and water chestnuts into small dice and combine with the pork, soya sauces, sesame oil and egg in a large bowl. Use your hands to form the mixture into meatballs about an inch across, and roll them in the seasoned flour.

Slice the vegetables into matchsticks. Saute the meatballs in a small amount of vegetable oil while you bring 1½ pints of the broth to a gentle simmer. When the meatballs are cooked and the broth is bubbling gently, drop the vegetables into the broth and immediately turn the heat off. Fill bowls with the vegetable-filled broth and place meatballs in each bowl. Garnish with sliced spring onion and eat immediately.

These meatballs are also fantastic just served with rice and a little soya sauce with raw chillies diced into it to dip.

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Frickadellen – a fabulous meatball

Sometimes, the best recipes come about by sheer accident. This was one of them, and if you make anything from this blog this month, you really should think about making these moist little meatballs – they’re fast, completely delicious and very easy. So easy I feel a little ashamed.

Frickadellen, a Teutonic cross between a meatball and a burger, are little patties made from white meats, usually veal and pork. I had been poking around in the fridge, wondering what on earth to do with half a bowl of olives, some randomly purchased vegetables and some bread which was on the verge of going stale, and came up with this. The results really had no business being this good. Clearly the little god who works the refrigerator light was smiling on me. Try making these the next time you feel the need to sacrifice a wilting lettuce and an about-to-burst tomato to him.

You’ll need:

1 pack good sausages
1 egg
3 slices soft white bread
1 red pepper
6 spring onions
2 cloves garlic
½ cup olives
A grating of nutmeg
2 dried chilis
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
2 chicken breasts

Skin the sausages, and put them in the food processor with everything except the chicken breasts, and whizz until you have a rough paste. Add the chicken breasts and pulse until they’re chopped roughly, mixed in with the other ingredients. Form round patties about the size of a ping-pong ball and saute (I used some bacon fat left over from breakfast’s patented hangover cure, some very crispy bacon sandwiches). Turn regularly for between 10 and 15 minutes, and serve hot with rice and a salad.

The olives keep everything moist (use black or green ones preserved in oil, not in salt, and make sure they’re de-stoned); the coriander seeds pop, full of flavour, in your mouth; the bread gives the meatballs a beautifully tender texture; and the red pepper makes everything sweet and juicy. Delicious.

My guilt at the easiness of preparing these meatballs was soon realised. I had a sneaking suspicion that food this good should involve suffering. It just wasn’t my suffering – immediately afterwards, Mr Weasel, washing up, nearly chopped his thumb off on the Magimix blade. It now has three macho-looking stitches (administered by my Dad, a GP with a delicate touch and a good line in sympathy for the poor sod who has to live with his daughter). No photographs, in that I am hoping that you will want to keep coming back to read this blog, and I suspect you’ll be put off by extreme clinical detail.

Happily (I think), Mr Weasel has said that he’d cheerfully chop most of the other thumb off if it means he can have these Frickadellen a second time. I think that’s probably as good a recommendation as I’m going to get. Enjoy these, but be careful about what sharp-edged, curved bits of steel might be lurking under the bubbles in your sink afterwards.