Meat-Balls and Sauce. An Old Family Recipe, Which I Have Just Invented. #fritz

The sauce is a bit thin, but very flavourful.

Louis Shalako

Meatballs and Sauce: An Old Family Recipe.

 

An old family recipe, which I am still working on but it’s coming along all right…

So, I bought the dozen Italian-style meatballs from Walmart, $6.97. These are displayed in the Angus meat section of our local outlet here in Sarnia, Ontario.

Taking a bit of foil, I lined the bottom of a bread-pan, leaving a bit of a tail to cover the top, admittedly, I might have given that another two inches.

If that doesn’t work, we can always wash the pan, ladies and gentlemen.

The twelve meatballs fit nicely, and I added two thin slices of a small onion, broken up into little rings for the photos, a couple of segments of sweet red pepper, cut into medium-sized rectangles, three chopped olives, a few shreds of leftover tomato, and what is almost the point of the whole exercise, about half of a small tub of frozen tomato sauce from the freezer.

I had made two or three 12” pepperoni-everything-on-it pizzas a month or so ago, and one way or another, use it or throw it out, that shit just had to go.

The rest of it goes down the sink…

Leftover tomato sauce. #argh

The middle class just hates to waste food, ladies and gentlemen.

Luckily, I have always been a working-class sort of a person. It keeps me humble, and it's what, thirty cents worth of sauce.

I used a bit of garlic powder, black pepper, minimal salt, a sprinkle of dried parsley flakes and a very judicious shake of oregano.

I had enough foil to cover the top, poke a few holes in there, and then I preheated the oven to 375 F, and put that in for forty-five minutes or an hour or so while I sit here and think about all the crazy stuff in my head—

Be that as it may.

But I have also been thinking about the recipe in terms of sausage, for example, perhaps with a bit of cabbage, not exactly huge, full leaves, and not exactly cut as fine as coleslaw either—a bit of celery, a few mushrooms, tomato sauce, and let that sit in the oven for a while, right? All we have to do is to stay awake, at that point.

You never know what you might come up with. I do have Parmesan cheese to sprinkle on there, and that might be served with a humongous dill pickle, a wedge of old cheddar cheese, and a good dollop of potato and egg salad, with a careful bit of paprika on there along with the salt and pepper, bearing in mind what goes in one end must, eventually, come out the other.

You can, of course, put this sort of stuff on spaghetti noodles, or rice, or just on a plate, the truth is, I’ve been experimenting with meatballs lately. Why, I just don’t know—I just have.

At some point that incredible aroma begins to emanate from the general vicinity of the kitchen, where good old #fritz has decided to rear his ugly head, finally, and get this freaking dog and pony show on the road.

#fritz, recovering from face surgery.

(#fritz is a Swiss-born, Cordon-Bleu chef, whom we adopted as a very small boy and he sleeps in the broom closet, mostly because he doesn’t want to go home. Also, he’s still recovering from recent plasticene surgery, what with that unfortunate smelting accident, in his role as a budding alchemist and something of an itinerant-transient philosophical and peripatetic iatrochemist as well. He's also an imaginary character, although he does help out around the house... - ed.)

Enough on the back story—

Oh, we have the remains of a half-bottle of Santa Carolina, a nice ’22 vintage Chilean cabernet sauvignon, just to wash that down and hopefully we don’t have the shits about five hours later.

But that, as they say, is another one of our tales from the riverbank.

Also.

Years ago, when I was a very small boy. A little place in Delhi used to make beautiful meatball subs. They were, of course, toasted in an oven rather than cold or microwaved.

I would have to find a lot more confidence, but my oven will broil, and I do have garlic powder and butter…sub or hoagie buns are available in any grocery store, as well as the mozzarella mentioned in this article. It also strikes me that when buying a sandwich from a retailer, the meatball sub, the pizza sub, were among the lower priced items on the menu.

END

 

Poor old Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on ArtPal.

Our good friend and colleague Constance 'Dusty' Miller has a new romance in audio and ebook formats.

How to Make a Meatball Submarine Sandwich.

 

Thank you for reading.