This past weekend were the NFL Divisional Playoffs – the games before the games before the Superbowl. My father is a big Dallas Cowboys fan and told my mother he wanted to get everything done on Saturday so that he could watch them stomp on the Giants on Sunday. Good plan.
We usually eat some form of roasted meat on Sundays, but this week, my mother asked me to prepare something that we could eat in front of the television like the football-watching savages we are. She suggested meatball heroes. I never say no to a good hero.
And so it was, and it was good.
In an effort to keep our arteries nice and flexible, I decided on turkey meatballs. I have no beef with beef, but I'm trying to cut the cals where their absence will be noticed the least, and when you have cheese, tomato sauce, and crusty bread, I say you don't even need meat. Many will disagree. Some of them live in my house. But whatever. Turkey it is. Gobble. Gobble gobble. Plus my mom requested my recipe for what she proclaimed the best meatballs she's ever eaten. They happen to be made from turkey. Voilà.
My Irish-German cousin always brags that he learned to make meatballs from a 100-year-old Italian woman. Well, I learned from a 60-year-old Jew, and I think mine are better. My sister and I exclusively use Ina Garten's recipe for “Real Meatballs” (as opposed to fake ones, I guess). However, we freely make changes, so now we have our own Kraut McJew recipe. I laugh at tradition. My meatballs are fantastic...if I stick to my recipe.
The secret to my meatballs, regardless of what type of marbled meat I use, is my combo of bread soaked in milk and seasoned dry bread crumbs. It's a magical combination that imparts the perfect texture. What I usually do is cut up some Wonder white sandwich bread (about 4 slices per 1.5 lbs of animal matter) into small (¼”) cubes. I soak that in enough milk to almost cover the bread (maybe ½ to ¾ cup). Then I work with my other ingredients.
I only have laziness to blame for yesterday's meatball debacle. I didn't feel like using a second bowl (I can't handle all that washing!), so I put the bread and milk in my huge Pyrex bowl (I was also doubling the recipe). I think I ended up using too much milk in the first place because of the shape of the bowl – maybe I'm imagining it. Geometry was never my strong point. But my critical error was adding everything else to this bowl of bready mush later. See, I usually keep the bread and milk aside until the end, but that means two bowls. Remember the lazy. This time, I mixed everything together at once, and the bread got way to evenly combined and my meatballs were a bit more dense than I wood have liked, just like my brother.
Nobody complained. In fact, I still received compliments. But not best-meatball-ever compliments. It was sad. And Dallas lost. Maybe if I added the mush at the end, the Cowboys could have one. Then, my beloved Packers would have to play in Texas Stadium where they haven't won since 1989. I guess I should be grateful for my dense meatballs after all. Go Pack Go!
*****
Edit: My father reheated the meatballs in the oven for a couple of hours in my large Le Creuset Dutch oven. The texture and flavor dramatically improved.
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