Meatballs, or fiddling with recipes

Yesterday I was supposed to post my cooking blog, but I got so carried away with domestic crises—stained carpet, water erosions, and so on—that I forgot. So here’s yesterday’s Gourmet on a Hot Plate, only a day late.

Love meatballs but hate making them? I do! Recipes seem unnecessarily complicated; in some you bake them and then finish in a skillet; in others, you simply brown them in the skillet, which makes me testy—my meatballs are never perfectly round, and browning all sides is a problem. So I was delighted to find a basic recipe that can be used with any ground meat and requires only baking. But of course I had to fiddle with it.

Here’s the basic recipe:

1 lb. ground meat—beef, pork, veal, chicken, turkey, or a combination

½ cup panko

1 egg

1 tsp. kosher salt

Black pepper and other seasonings of your choice—depending on the meat. You might choose cumin, curry, chile flakes, smoky paprika, whatever.

Minced garlic, onions or shallots.

Chopped parsley, basil or cilantro

What I did:

1 lb. ground lamb

½ cup panko

1 egg

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. oregano

1 Tbsp. tomato paste

Minced shallot

Chopped cilantro

Mix all ingredients together thoroughly and shape into 1-1/2-inch balls. Bake until firm and golden, 7-10 minutes, at 350. The recipe advises frying or broiling to finish them, but I just baked them a little longer and they were a nice golden brown all over. Don’t overbake so that you end up with hard little lumps.

If it’s lamb, I figured tzatziki sauce would go with them.

Tzatziki sauce

1 cucumber, peeled, seeded, and diced

2 cups plain Greek yogurt

Pinch of cayenne

1 tsp. dried dill or 1 Tbsp. fresh

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 Tbsp, fresh lemon juice

½ tsp. kosher salt

¼ tsp. fine ground black pepper

Grate the cucumber, using the large holes on the grater. Drain in a colander and wrap in paper towels to press out as much liquid as possible. Let it sit fifteen minutes.

Mix everything together. Chill at least four hours before serving.

Yogurt gets watery in the fridge, and your tzatziki sauce will get watery in you have leftovers. That does not mean it’s gone bad. Just pour off the liquid. Should keep a week in the fridge.

For some reason, mysterious even to me, I decided corn salad would be good with the meatballs. When I first put it together and tasted it, I was not pleased. But then I began to add things, and my family gave a thumbs up to the final product:

Corn salad

3 cups corn kernels—in an ideal world, grill three ears of corn and strip off the kernels; but you can use frozen corn. Either way make sure the corn is cooked until tender.

Kosher salt

½ cup mayonnaise

½ cup crumbled feta—make sure it is soft and fresh; I had some in the fridge that was old, hard, and tasteless

1 4 oz. can chopped green chillies

Juice of two limes

1 Tbsp. chili powder

2 Tbsp. chopped cilantro

Mix all together and chill thoroughly before serving.

These recipes made a great meal, and three of us had leftovers to nibble on for a couple of days. Now I’m pondering chicken meatballs for a variation—what seasonings would you use? I’m not a great fan of tarragon, which is usually paired with chicken.