Cleanin’ Out My Cabinets: Meatballs

A few weeks ago I caught up with a friend from college that occasionally reads the blog.  During the course of a relatively serious discussion about MBA internship opportunities, he said something along the line of, “more importantly, do you have a good meatball recipe?”  Gotta say, it made me feel pretty inadequate.  Not only did I not have a good meatball recipe, I couldn’t even say that I’ve ever liked a traditional meatball I’d made.  Sure, I’ve cooked lots of enjoyable turkey meatballs during ill-fated attempts at diets, but I didn’t have a go-to normal recipe.  I dodged the question and moved along.

With a lot of heavy snowfall recently, I didn’t have to wait too long to take a shot at honing my meatball craft.  My goal was to replicate the absurdly good meatballs from Vila Di Roma in Philadelphia, but of course I didn’t follow the one known aspect of that recipe: 100% 80/20 ground beef.  Instead I started with a pound of pork and a pound of veal.

Every time I see the “meatloaf mix” at the grocery store (that supposedly includes beef, veal, and pork) I shake my head and wonder who would buy that.  Then I get hungry because of how delicious that combination sounds

In my search for a Vila Di Roma copycat recipe I came across one that used veal and pork and went by the name “the best meatballs recipe”.  Since I am an idiot and believe everything I read on the internet, I decided to work off this recipe and make some changes here and there.  The title may have been a touch overzealous.

I despise following recipes for good reason: I think I know better than their instructions and some of the time, I am correct.  When I am wrong, I forget about it, but when I am right I am pissed that I blindly followed a recipe when it seemed like I was adding to much or too little of something.  With that in mind, here’s the 2 eggs, parsley, seasoning, and fresh grated cheese the recipe recommended.

To invoke the classic Seinfeld Lloyd Braun, glasses and gum episode, “Am I crazy, or is that a lotta cheese?”, “IT’S A LOTTA CHEESE!”

Using my hands, I went through the grotesque (to watch) process of mixing ground meat with other ingredients.  No ground meat is safe from how unappetizing I can make this process look.  Adding salt and pepper to hamburger patties becomes some sort of bizarre, jiggling dance when I’m in charge.  Whatever, it’s effective and you’ll never get a poorly distributed ingredient in my house.

After this was fully mixed, I added in a few slices of cubed, slightly stale bread and a half cup of warm water.  I am as skeptical now as I was then, but I was surprised by how many meatball recipes called for this.

With the addition of water and bread, I was way off the Vila Di Roma script at this point, so I decided to check back in on a few articles about their meatballs.  That’s where I got a hot tip on coating your hands with olive oil before rolling your meatballs.

Certainly not turning the unappetizing train around with this pic, but it was nice to not have ground meat stuck to my fingers for once when making these

As usual, I started with a few really small meatballs.  Then, once I made a few bigger ones and liked how they looked I went back and added some more meat to the first few. Once I had 10 or 12 done, I didn’t like how big they all looked and went back through pullign a little meat off of each and re-rolling.  Cooking always seems to bring out the undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive mess inside of me.  Regardless, after a few minutes I had this tray of 24.

If you think I was capable of leaving that last slot open and didn’t pull a bit of meat off of a bunch of them to even the number and fill the tray, you aren’t reading the blog enough.  Not comfortable with the fact that I am making OCD jokes so soon after Girls drove the topic into the ground

Meatballs are pretty cool to look at in this state.  Don’t believe me?  Here comes the arty natural light shot by the window!

Isn’t it nice that for once I am showing a big tray of balls and there isn’t anything gross going on? Seemingly a first for me, need to make something gross soon and get this ship righted

The meatballs went into a 400F oven and I started working on a simple marinara sauce to compliment them.  I mean really simple.  A couple cans of whole peeled tomatoes chopped up well and dumped on top of a few cloves of minced garlic sauteeing in olive oil.  I let that cook for 15 or so, then added some white wine, basil, salt and black pepper.

Lotsa salt.  I elected not to do the sugar thing since they were canned tomatoes and the wine added a little sweetness

This simmered together with some regular stirring for about 30 more minutes, at which point the meatballs were about ready to join the party.

“Whoa!!! You gonna eat that?  Just let me know, because I think that looks amazing!!” – my imaginary supportive cooking friend

This was the exact moment that I finally accepted the best way to cook meatballs is something I’m just not willing to do in my house: deep frying.  Fry them up quick to lock in all the fat and cheese stuff that cooked out of these.  The oven wasn’t hot enough to harden the outside quickly.  Oh and I also used way too much cheese.

Quick sidebar: as a kid we used to eat something called “booger chicken” in the Ryan household.  It was bone in chicken thighs and drumsticks baked in an oven with a coating of garlic powder and salt plus a pat of butter on each piece of chicken.  Possibly margarine actually.  Obviously it tasted delicious, but the real root of my love of booger chicken was the “crispies”.   I would sit on the floor by the open oven and use a grapefruit spoon to scrape the bottom of the pan, eating the crispy pieces of seasoned chicken fat and burned butter left behind.  Before writing that I didn’t realize how bad it would look in print.  It was delicious, awful for me, and led to my constant battle with what tastes really good vs. what is healthy.

Anyhoo, that burnt and browned crap between the meatballs?  I would eat that with a grapefruit spoon three times a day and six on Sunday.  It was that delicious; just cheese, animal fat, salt, self loathing and happiness.  If those things go together.  I had to throw it away before I ate too much of it.

Back to the simmering sauce.

This looked far better than expected given the minimal cooking time.  Thank good golly for that Cooks Illustrated book Tim gave me and I wasn’t properly grateful for

Once the meatballs were pried out of their cheesy cement, they looked a little closer to the meatballs I had hoped to make, so I added them to the sauce to simmer for another 30 minutes.

I am 95% certain that we got this pan when my sister-in-law was considering throwing it away.  It has been used 5 times a week for 5 years and I honestly don’t know what I will do with myself when I finally have to retire it

I could have left these simmering all day or for multiple days, but I was hungry when the thirty minutes were up and dove in.  How bout a dusting of cheese and one more natural lighting shot before the requisite recap?

This is the best window shot yet and does make the food look more appetizing than the straight down shots from overhead that my belly is blurily poking into the bottom of

The meatballs and sauce were delicious, even if they weren’t quite what I was hoping for.  The Vila Di Roma variety are almost crunchy on the outside and hold together well but have a wonderful tender and uniform consistency inside.  The flavor is mostly just beef with hints of traditional Italian seasonings, all wrapped up in their salty and delicious sauce.  Mine weren’t like that.

I couldn’t have told you that the meatballs I made had pork and veal in them, but you knew it wasn’t beef.  The consistency was slightly rubbery due to the amount of cheese and egg involved, but pretty uniform and not chewy at all.  The flavor was great, if slightly underwhelming because nothing really stood out.  I’m making these meatballs sound awful but we happily ate them for 24 hours with pasta, sub rolls, and on their own.  They were very tasty, just not what I was hoping for.

Next time aroung I’m going all beef and stinking up the house with some deep frying.  I will get these meatballs right, I live too far from Philly not to.

Cleanin’ Out My Cabinets: Head-On Shrimp

This will serve as a nice light post in between relatively large posts.  This was ready to be posted last Friday but I forgot until today.  I’m just happy to be getting some posts out during the holiday season since I’ve averaged about one post a December since I started this thing.  I believe in family time and unplugging the computer during the holidays which is why I like to post minimally.

YeeeeeeeeeeeOK, Pete!!!  I open more text messages than presents on Christmas morning.  I love technology and I’m just lazy about posting.

First, lets clarify that this post has nothing to do with the most infuriating, repetitive, and, as a result, memorable ad from the past five years:

Instead, I am trying to make clear the difference between a standard grocery store shrimp and what I cooked for this post: fresh shrimp, caught in the Gulf of Mexico, never frozen, and with the head left on.

Yeah, sooooo not my picture. Forgot to take some initial shots before cooking as usual

Most shrimp you get in the grocery store or even a fish market is previously frozen and partially cleaned (head removed and deveined) before you buy it.  Even worse is when it’s all of those things then cooked and refrozen.  I love using frozen raw shrimp as an ingredient, but the true flavor of shrimp barely exists with the head and shell taken away.  It’s like the difference between a chicken breast and a bone-in chicken thigh; both can be delicious, but only one really tastes like chicken.

I discovered the fresh head-on shrimp at the fish market on my last visit to Naples and couldn’t wait to get my hands on it again.  This time around as part of a progressive (read spaced out, random, small plates) dinner on our last night in Naples for Thanksgiving.  On the menu: stone crab claws, a pseudo Thai-style shrimp, and fish tacos with our haul from a fishing trip the day before.  I’ve covered most of these items previously, so let’s skip right to the shrimp prep.

I started with 7-8 cloves of garlic, half a red onion, a few baby carrots, a rib of celery, and some leftover ham in the mini-prep.

Mmmmm, ham mirepoix.  There needs to be a term for mirepoix + garlic and salty pork.  It’s the base for almost anything delicious.  Moving forward with this blog I think I will be referring to it as “mirepete”.  So, um, write that down or something

With a few spins in each direction, the ingredients were coarsely chopped and a relatively uniform size.  I heated up a couple tablespoons of olive oil and a couple tablespoons of chili oil in a pot before dumping the contents of the mini prep in (the mirepete).  After a few minutes, the garlic and the sugar in the ham started to brown and I seasoned with a little curry powder, salt, and pepper.

Pork fat makes everything taste better, which is going to be an overwhelming and obnoxiously persistent aspect of the holiday dinner mega-post I got in queue

At this point I added a dark beer (it was actually an Odouls, still working through the backlog from Kristi’s pregnancy a year and a half later) and let it boil down for 5-10 minutes.  Once it had reduced by about half, I added a can of coconut milk and let it heat to a low simmer.

I can usually maintain this level of a simmer for 3-4 seconds, especially on an electric range, before it either goes back to cold or a raging boil.  Still haven’t figured out the stovetop, will get the hang of it within 20-30 years I’m thinkin’

After a few minutes of simmering, the coconut milk was well blended with the reduced beer and chili oil.

Completely unable to slow this process. I’ve come to accept that this is Pete’s version of a low simmer

After a quick rinse under some tap water, I uncerimoniously dumped just under two dozen large head-on shrimp into the pot.

That’s some trademark Pete cooking right there.  Dump some sh*t in, hold off on stirring so a photo can be snapped, then realize I’ve already overcooked the bottom-most item

After a quick stir to make sure every shrimp was covered in the liquid, the heat went up and everything boiled together for about 3 minutes.  After doing a quick check for firmness (three minutes was probably too long), I pulled the pot off the heat and stirred in a handful of chopped basil.

These shrimp were way bigger than the last ones I bought at the same market.  I just said two pounds, not a size.  I decided to blame any over-doneness on the size since I had no other scapegoats

Next step was plating and as usual I made some ungodly effort to dress things up.  It was pathetic as expected, with each dish getting three shrimp with barely attached heads and a hefty spoonful of the broth they cooked in.

Out of focus or not, just looks like some random piles of shrimp shells in someone’s nice dishes.  Whatever, I see the potential deliciousness in things normal people may not.  At least that’s how I justify pausing and contemplating next to uneaten sausage links on room service trays outside stranger’s hotel rooms

Served with a flourish of dramatically placed basil as a garnish.

Awwwwww yeeeaaahhhhh, Pete!  Put that leaf there!  Show the world what you got!

Eating shrimp like this is pretty sloppy, and there really isn’t a delicate way to do it.  Your only choice is to make a mess shelling the coconut milk and chili oil coated shrimp by hand, but I promise it is well worth it.

The shrimp itself doesn’t take on a lot of the chili and coconut milk flavor, but you can dip in the broth remaining in the bowl.  The combination of the rich sweetness and the spicy oil works so awesome with shrimp, and the broth actually tastes of shrimp since the heads and legs have boiled in it.

Speaking of the heads, the best part of head-on shrimp is sucking on the heads after you separate them from the bodies.  There’s only a little meat and shrimp fat to be had, but the flavors of the boil end up concentrated in the head area.  It tastes a little like mild fish liver, but also with a strong sweet shrimp flavor.  Definitely not for everyone, but if you eat lobster roe and tomalley or enjoy the flavor in the body of soft shell crabs, you will enjoy gnawing on some shrimp heads.

Might break this next mega post up into a couple posts with a few days in between.  You must be so excited.