Spicy Meatballs

March 24, 2008

Written by: Katie

Once again I present you with a simple, delicious meal that is healthy, healthy, healthy.  Today we are exploring the wonderful world of meatballs.  They are like mini meatloafs and I love meatloaf. No really.  I love it.

These are the ingredients:

1T minced garlic

2t fresh chopped parsley

1T dried basil

2t ground cumin

1T dried dill weed

1/2t ground black pepper

1/2 dry bread crumbs

1.5t yellow mustard

1/2t salt

2 eggs, beaten

1C shredded pepperjack cheese

1.5lb ground beef

1/2 lb liver

Now we always use organic grass fed beef and I would strongly recommend that if you are going to go eating the organs of other animals that you would choose organic, grass fed as well.  I won’t go into detail because the alternative is too yucky to think about.  See that glass jar with the yellow stuff?  That is my homemade mustard.  Did I ever show you how to make home made mustard?  I found a great home made mayo tutorial tonight.  I’ll be sharing that with you later in the week. 

This is the liver.  It is soaking in lemon juice because that is what it is supposed to do.  Refer to Nourishing Traditions if you want the skinny on internal organs skinny dipping in citrus juice.  It’s all very interesting but not something I have time to go into now.  This is my first time documenting myself cooking with liver and I have come to the conclusion that liver just not photograph well.  I spent hours on this picture in Photoshop and this is as good as it gets.  Say “yum” for me please?

And look what I am going to do.

I take it back.  It does get worse.  Then I pureed the liver.  I’ll spare you the picture inside the food processor.

Hmmmmm….yum?

I am kind enough to spare you a close up shot of the pureed liver.   You can see it in the background underneath the garlic and parsley.  I love garlic.  Yes I do.

I’ve added all the spices, basil, cumin, dill, pepper.  The bread crumbs (From a box no less.  Do you know what they put in that stuff?  Never again!) are in.  Mustard and salt also found their way in.  Now this is a picture of the pepperjack going in.  I don’t know if it was our pepperjack but these meatballs were not nearly as “knock you in the mouth” as they were last time we made them.  I was a bit disappointed and I will probably add more cheese next time.  Because I love cheese.  Ya, mama.

Now it is time for the eggs.  Has anyone noticed that I have doubled the recipe in the pictures?  That’s my life.  Nothing is the right size for our family.  We are an oddity, a circus side show, an attraction.  And those contests on the radio stations where you can win a “family vacation” (for four) to Tijuana for 5days/6nights, well they are just a joke.  We don’t even bother.  But we do bother to continue the cooking tutorial.  Because we are nice that way.

Oh lookie here.  The eggs got themselves all worked into a frothy mess.  Did I mention I like eggs?  I could eat them raw.  I’ve been known to.  So have my children, but don’t tell them.  I did say I love eggs, right?  Yes, I did.

Now since I was kind of a one man show here with this recipe I mixed it all by myself and no one took pictures.  But you will have to trust me when I say that I washed my hands before and after I mixed the ingredients and I even scrubbed under my nails.  I love meatballs but pathogens not so much.  Not so much.

Finally I enlisted some help.  Although I didn’t feel that little people could adequately combine 4 pounds of raw cow parts I did imagine they could roll said parts into spherical shapes of somewhat similar sizes and place them on a cookie sheet.  Did you see I used the word spherical?  Now I can count this as school.  Yes I can.

I’m not sure about my girls’ hands and the level of bacteria under their nails so I made sure to cook these meatballs until they were 140 degrees in the middle.  I do know that there were no cockroach legs in our meatballs and that means we are still doing better than 90% of restaurants.  Look at the lovely meatballs.  You can start salivating now.  I’ll wait.

Admire those symmetrical lines of meatballs dissecting every which way creating a grid in which you can create coordinates on the x and y axis.  Now THAT is definitely school.

And they are done done done.  I’m sorry but now I am salivating.  Because, you see, I was there and I know.  I know just how good these little meatballs were.  Sadly, they are all gone.  We HAD left overs but bright and early the next morning they were requested for breakfast.  And I’m no dummy.  This was a meal the kids could warm themselves and it freed me to do something really productive like check my e-mail.

Hey, everyone ate and everyone was happy.  That is all that matters.  Oh and ketchup.  Ketchup matters too.  A whole lot.  It is completely un-American to eat any ground meat product without ketchup.  I think I read that in the Constitution.  That’s right.  And now we can count eating meatballs as American History.  We don’t want to break any laws so we are certain to apply the ketchup liberally.

The meatballs were well received.  Even with the faint liver taste.  No one else even mentioned it but I could taste it.  It was slightly bothersome due to my negative liver experience a couple years back but I can consider this therapy.  It’s ok Katie, eat the yummy meatball, you know you like it.  That faint odor means nothing to you.  Enjoy the ground meat texture in your mouth.  Doesn’t it bring back warm memories of your childhood?  Don’t you want to save that one last bite for the family dog?   Why, yes.  Yes I do.  Bring on the meatballs!!  We really did enjoy them.  I bet you would too.

Posted in Cook Along