Little Balls of Meat - A Co-Blogging Adventure

So about two weeks ago Jenna came over to make meatballs. She was dog sitting at the time, so she brought Sophie along, which pleased Ruby. Jenna calls the recipe "The Worlds Best Meatballs", when in reality, the recipe is called "My Favourite Meatballs"... potato-potato, they were pretty damn good. 

Now, normally, meatballs contain at least two types of meat (usually pork and beef, but I've seen sausage, and lamb thrown in as well), but these only called for beef, which is good, cause that's all I had on hand. At first I thought they would turn out too tough, because that's my experience with all beef meatballs, but that wasn't the case, the balls were nice and tender. (FYI: I'm going to try and work the word "balls" as many times as I can into the post - real mature!)

I didn't take any pictures of the balls cooking process because I was busy cooking... so here's a picture I stole from the website where we got the recipe

I think what made the balls really stand out was the sauce. It was a pretty basic tinned tomatoes + tomato paste + herbs, but it was really good. I forgot how tomato paste adds a lot of "oomph" to tomato dishes. I did find it a bit too sweet, so when I make it again (and I will), I'm going to reduce the sugar to 1 tbsp, instead of the 4 tbsp in the recipe. Jenna commented on not measuring out the oregano, but really, I would just keep adding until it tastes right, especially when it comes to dry herbs, which vary a lot in quality. We only simmered the sauce for about 45 min, instead of the 75 min recommended in the recipe. I don't think any major flavour was lost to the reduced simmering time, if we did simmer for longer, it would of thickened a bit and maybe be even more sweet due to caramelization and water reduction. 

And as for using generic Co-Op ingredients instead of fancy organic-single source-local-fair trade ingredients.... meh. There are times when I try to be a good citizen of the earth, and there are times when my wallet and convenience just say no. Because I believe that a lot of the flavour from the sauce came from the tomato paste, which is pretty heavily processed (in the sense that it's tomato puree simmered for ages and then canned, not that it has a lot of scary ingredients), I don't think if we used something better it would have necessarily made the dish taste any better. Free range beef would've been more tough, but probably tastier. I would also think of using fresh oregano next time... 

I think Jenna takes a long time to cook because she's a slow with a knife... that 's just a matter of practice though. 

However there is always time for doggie pictures... it took us awhile, but we finally taught Sophie how to play tug

See Jenna's post on the evenings events here