Convincing Ray otherwise....

[week of 11/16/08]

He thinks meatballs are bunk. He'll come up with rich cafeteria style descriptions of how awful they can be. [not sure if cafeteria style descriptions is quite what I mean - but, what Ray is thinking about, when he thinks about meatballs, are the kind they sling at you when you are travelling through a line with a plastic tray in hand]

He could be right, but, I'm not ready to surrender the point. Wanted to do some searching and experimenting still.

So, I read around, in Joy of Cooking and on epicurious, and tried to find some meatball recipes, for my first try at this way of preparing beef.

Ended up settling on this recipe.

It calls for sausage, not beef. But, I saw that many people used 50/50 sausage/beef, and a few did just beef. So, I tried it with just beef. In the future, I would like to try it again with the 50/50 combination.

They were pretty good, I thought. And, I will say this: very easy to make. No cooking of any ingredients, hardly any chopping or dicing. Pretty much just mixing it all together.

The hard thing was that I also needed to make a tomato sauce to serve them with. Having read all the reviews that accompanied the meatball recipe, which also had a tomato sauce recipe, I opted for a different sauce - the sauce that went with these meatballs was universally disliked by the reviewers.

So, I picked Spicy Tomato Sauce. Again, not hard to make at all, BUT, it does take time. Need to leave several hours for this to cook, after getting it going.

Ray commented very highly on the sauce, and, he was way more receptive to the meatballs than his initial commentary would have suggested. And, by receptive, I mean that he not only ate them with a certain amount of enthusiasm (I think this might be a place where some would say: he ate them with gusto), but he also even said that they were pretty good.

Here's my summary: they were good, but, not good enough to make exactly the same a second time, in the near future. But, good enough to want to try with the sausage/beef mix at some point. In the meantime, before that even, there are some other meatball experiments I want to try, including another potentially universally reviled but cafeteria style classic: beef stroganoff. I'm giggling just thinking about it, but, really, I'm serious. Just wait and see.