What I did on my summer vacation: I ate and ate and then I ate some more. The husband and I took the kids on a road trip back east to spend time with our families and friends and this is how we did it.
Tag: New Jersey
Maybe it’s Time For Meatballs
It is such a beautiful morning. Through my open kitchen window, I can hear cars driving on the road beyond the tree line and saws buzzing in the yard behind ours. Birds are talking to each other and these sounds of spring come to me at last on a cool though slightly humid breeze lifting the cobwebs from my winter brain.
The fair weather makes today the kind of day when one might consider firing up the Weber and grilling a burger, medium rare, outdoors. I’m not quite there yet with that seasonal craving. For me, a pot of meatballs in gravy simmering on the stove alongside a giant pot of water rambunctiously boiling and lapping at great big handfuls of spaghetti is what I’m thinking this day begs for.
I’ve been around meatball-making since the day I was brought home from the hospital, only days old and swaddled in a blanket. Being raised in an Italian-American family in Jersey, meatballs are an important part of the Sunday tradition which includes a holy to-do list:
First, Church, followed by a visit to the cemetery to arrange flowers and trim weeds on the graves of loved ones, then to Chickies – the Italian market– for meat, cheese, and bread, then across the street to Frieda’s vegetable stand where we pick fresh peaches out of wooden crates in the summer; lift and drag our Christmas tree home from every winter.
This weekly processional was led by my stocky grandmother, Carmella, followed by my father carrying the groceries and then my sister and I falling behind. The two of us unable to casually walk past cardboard boxes filled with craggy sheets of salted cod would lean our heads and shoulders inside for a peak and a whiff.
In my family the recipe for meatballs is never written down — it’s a little of this and a little of that and mini marshmallow sized pieces of milk-soaked bread in every bite. As I’ve mentioned in a past post, I have upon my baker’s rack, Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, and I have to say, I was aware that she had a recipe for meatballs. But be it pride or a little bit of apprehension over messing with my family’s meatballs, I wouldn’t even look.
But then one day I did, look and I’m looking over both of my shoulders before I tell you this…I will never go back to making my meatballs the same again. Oh Boy! is right.
It’s not so much Marcella’s ingredients, and to be honest, I pretty much stick with what I’m used to: ground beef, garlic, Amen!, Pecorino Romano cheese, fresh parsley, eggs, milk, olive oil, salt and pepper. It’s her technique that has improved my meatballs….Forever!
After placing all the ingredients into a bowl, she doesn’t just splash some milk over the top. She soaks a piece of bread in a little milk in a small pot on a low flame on the stove, which means no more mouthfuls of soggy bread! Then– and this is just genius — after forming her meatballs, she rolls them in fine breadcrumbs just before frying them. And, yes, you have to fry your meatballs before simmering them in your sauce.
Here is my recipe greatly inspired by Marcella’s “Meatballs and Tomatoes”
- A slice of good-quality white bread (I used 1/2 cup homemade breadcrumbs I made from Italian bread)
- 1/3 cup of milk
- 1 pound of ground beef, preferably chuck
- 1 tablespoon of onion chopped very fine (I used two cloves of garlic minced instead)
- 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
- 1 egg
- 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
- 3 tablespoons freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese (I used Pecorino Romano instead)
- Whole nutmeg * I read that nutmeg deepens the flavor of your ingredients — you shouldn’t be able to actually taste nutmeg in your meatballs if you stick with the scant amount of 1/8 teaspoon freshly grated)
- Salt
- Black pepper, ground fresh from the mill
- Fine, dry unflavored bread crumbs, spread on a plate ( I used store-bought breadcrumbs and spread them in a pie dish)
- Vegetable oil (for frying)* I also just read in Cooks Illustrated, I believe that when frying in regular olive oil or vegetable oil there is no taste difference which is good news because vegetable oil is a lot less expensive. Be sure to use your good olive oil when making your meatballs though.
- 1 cup fresh, ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped, or canned imported tomatoes, chopped up, with their juice. (I used canned whole plum tomatoes and chopped them in a blender.)
- Trim away the bread’s crust, put the milk and bread (and I also put in the minced garlic) in a small saucepan, and turn on the heat to low. When the bread has soaked up all the milk, mash it to a pulp with a fork. Remove from heat and allow to cool completely.
- Into a bowl put the chopped meat, parsley, egg, tablespoon of your good olive oil, the grated cheese, the tiny (1/8 teaspoon) grating of nutmeg, the bread, garlic and milk mush, salt and several grindings of black pepper. Gently knead the mixture with your hands without squeezing it. When all the ingredients are evenly distributed, shape it gently and without squeezing into 1-inch balls. Roll the balls lightly in the breadcrumbs.
- Choose a saute pan large enough to hold all the meatballs in a single layer. Pour in enough vegetable oil to come 1/4 inch up the sides. Turn on the heat to medium high and when the oil is hot, slip in the meatballs. Brown on all sides, turning them carefully so they don’t break apart.
- Remove from heat, tip the pan slightly and with a spoon, remove as much fat as floats to the surface. Return the pan to the burner over medium heat, add the chopped tomatoes with their juice, a pinch of salt, and turn the meatballs over once or twice to coat them well. Cover the pan and adjust the heat to cook at a quiet, but steady simmer for about 20-25 minutes. Serve at once!
Voilà!
Wonder Woman, Where Are You?
This post is dedicated to my friends and family who have only temporarily lost their power.
When I was seven years- old I wanted to be Wonder Woman for Halloween. Do you remember the plastic costume of the seventies that came in a box with a small window of cellophane on the lid that showed the super-awesome plastic mask inside?
The one with the sharp-edged eye cut-outs, nostril-size holes and an opening outlined with painted red lips – just wide enough for a small mouth to peek out from but not big enough for a Babe Ruth to easily fit into? Do you remember forgetting to let go of the elastic band behind your head nice and easy when pulling it over your face? I don’t.
My mother scoffed at these cheap, flimsy, highly-flammable, dime-store costumes. Year after year, she made mine.
One year I was Mickey Mouse with a white crocheted sweater vest, the next, a sad little clown in baby blue gingham and white ric-rac, another year, a witch in a black dress and black cape, trick or treating half-heartedly in a wig made of thick bright- orange yarn stiched into a pointy witch’s hat. I do, however, remember fidgeting all through the measuring and re-measuring of my head as I twisted this way and that way every time It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown returned from commericals.
Each year, as soon as the maple tree in my front yard began dropping its skirt of red leaves all over the lawn, I was overcome by that same irrepressible longing to be Wonder Woman for Halloween. The straight-out- of- the- box kind and definitely not the pinned- to- a- pattern kind Mom would begin working on in the beginning days of long nights of October. I can still see the shape of her hunched over the sewing machine beneath the bright light above our dining room table.
The world needed the protection of a second-grader turned super-hero who swishes around in synthetic red, white and blue with an extra-majestic eagle’s wings fanned out over breasts drawn too large for a sixty-pound girl missing her two front teeth. No matter, the red patches at the bottom of the legs where her tall stiletto boots should be seemed just as reasonable.
Bad guys beware on Halloween because your bullets would be no match for my gold – plated titanium bracelets and crown! Quick! Right arm up! Ching! Quick! Left arm up! Ching! I would stop them all! The whoosh – whoosh of my lasso twisting the air into a cyclone above my head would be the last sound you’d hear before feeling the gold rope tighten around your chest, pinning your arms to your sides -you’d flail about like a crazed boa constrictor desperately trying to break free, spitting out the word “Drats!” at the sudden jerk and tug as I spun you towards me and to justice!
Ker – Pow! I, Wonder Woman, had just foiled your evil plan! There would be no Halloween candy for you.
This Halloween I wish my friends and family in New Jersey and New York the spirit of Wonder Woman. In keeping with the culinary nature of this blog… May you find the ingredients you need to create your own super hero recipe during the tough weeks ahead as homes are repaired, giant trees are cleared from the roads and power lines safely put back in the sky. And as the water returns to the ocean from this perfect storm, may your own super hero powers shine beneath a waning Harvest moon in a perfect balance of fierceness, strength and compassion. Finally may there be trick or treating for your children on Halloween night.
Fudge
I spent the last ten days of August at my parents’ house in New Jersey. They have a mother-daughter home with a fully furnished apartment in the basement, with a kitchen nicer and larger than the main one upstairs. They bought this home shortly after my grandfather died and it is where my grandmother came to live, surrounded by her family, with weekly visits from her grandchildren and great-children until she passed away a little more than two years ago. She was a role model for me in so many ways (compassionate, patient, generous) but especially in the kitchen. The meals she prepared were not gourmet by any means, however they were good and hearty – the kind of suppers that put “meat on your bones!”
I grew up at her kitchen table – the same table that sits in the kitchen in the basement of my parents’ home. Though the location has changed in the last 12 years or so, the table, sturdy enough to have survived the lifting and dropping by some big, gnarly-fisted moving men in bad moods and sharp turns in a rusting van, has not.
During visits back “home” my husband, kids and I always stay downstairs in Grandma’s apartment where I continue to sit at her kitchen table, though no longer with her across from me, arms folded while her fingers smooth the crease of a folded napkin.
My last night in New Jersey, while my little family slept, my father snored upstairs and presumably my mother had drifted off to an old black and white movie in their bedroom, I sat at my Grandmother’s table and began to carefully unwrap a piece of fudge I bought on the boardwalk that week on a trip to the Jersey Shore. It was my grandmother who first introduced me to such indulgence and she did it without apology or concern about whether or not it would wind up on her ample hips.
My grandmother taught me that food is good! That ingredients should be real- real butter, real sugar and real meat. Rich foods are to be enjoyed- every bite – all in moderation and most importantly, that guilt is a huge waste of a woman’s time.
So I sat there in perfect solitude and I enjoyed the gift of fudge. Fudge from Shriver’s, 9th Street and Boardwalk. Chocolate fudge, not chocolate with walnuts, not chocolate – marshmallow, not double-chocolate and never Peanut Butter and Jelly flavored or Maple. As for white chocolate? Why bother.
Just plain, smooth chocolate since 1898 – a quarter-pound the size and shape of a stick of butter. Slicing my third pat with the plastic knife the professional staff at the candy store thoughtfully included inside the white paper bag, I was achingly aware that one more after this and I’d be sick. Slowly I savored the richness and darkness of that last soft bite. Pulling a piece of pure joy off gently with my teeth, I flattened it to the roof of my mouth with my tongue, spreading it over every eager tastebud until it disappeared in my mouth, becoming part of me.
Every summer – fudge from the boardwalk, fresh from the Jersey Shore, steps from the ocean. Every summer, like fudge, I savor my family, my childhood friendships, my memories. I celebrate my roots and my grandmother. Because without her I would never know fudge.
Cake on Sundays 