Recipe the First - Meatballs

My sister-in-law, Caitlyn, asked me for recipes to a variety of things. Note the use of past tense, which indicates only that a thing happened prior to right now, without conveying the magnitude of temporal distance.

She asked some nine months ago. I'm lame.

So, at long last, here's the first: meatballs.

First, some context:

• I don't measure anything. This is the means by which I assert my masculinity in the kitchen.


• It comes out a little different every time.


• Texture and feel are my guide.


• I like garlic more than most.

Preparation

Here's what you need:

• A lot of garlic. Get garlic cloves, don't use dried, powdered stuff. I tend to use 8 to 10 cloves, depending on the size. Chop 'em finely or put 'em through a garlic press before you get started.


• Sauce: if I were more of a foodie, I would make my own, but I'm not and I don't. I tend to prefer Trader Joe's arabiata sauce, or its roasted garlic marinara. Classico's basic tomato/basil sauce is okay, as is its roasted red pepper sauce.


• Ground turkey: I tend to prefer the basic ground (not lean ground) Empire kosher turkey; industrial kosher is pretty similar in preparation to industrial organic, but costs less.


• Veggies: up to you, but my preference tends to be for a couple red peppers, a zucchini, and sliced mushrooms (either basic white or portabello will do), and a decent-sized onion.
  
  
  
  • Dice the onion
  
  
  • Chop the pepper into slices
  
  
  • I like to cut the zucchini lengthwise into two long, skinny halves, and then slice them up into half-moons
  
  
  
  


• Salt and (freshly ground, preferably) black pepper.


• Olive oil


• An egg


• Bread crumbs


• Pasta


• A good-sized frying pan; I recommend iron, if available.


• Another good-sized pan of whatever make you've got. I'll refer to this as the less-nice pan.


• A big-ass bowl


• A cleanser that contains bleach

Additionally, you will want one of the following:

• Oregano


• Basil (fresh if you can get it)


• Lemon juice (paired with basil in one of the alternatives below)

Getting the Meatballs Ready

Into the big-ass bowl, plop:

• The ground turkey


• Half the chopped-up garlic (unless you're doing the "fancy alternative" below, in which case save the garlic for the fanciness)


• Olive oil: a good pour, probably amounting to about a quarter cup. Don't be stingy with the fat. This is good fat, and most of it comes out into the water anyway.


• Salt: a pile. You obviously don't want to oversalt, but shake more on that you might be inclined to.


• Black pepper: a pile. Too much can overpower, but like the salt you want to put plenty in there. Incidentally, if you're using a grinder, the chances of putting too much in are a lot lower than if you're using pre-ground pepper.


• Bread crumbs: at least equal in volume to the turkey itself, but in fact probably more, perhaps like 20-30% more. This is something you get a sense for from repeated cooking attempts.


• The egg. Sans shell, preferably, unless you enjoy a crunch surprise.

Choose one of these flavoring alternatives and do it:

• Yia-yia's way: add oregano (probably equivalent to a couple tablespoon's worth) and a plop of sauce. Greek oregano if you've got it.


• Simple alternative: add basil (to taste, but I put in quite a bit) and a plop of sauce.


• Fancier alternative:
  
  
  
  1. Put olive oil in a pan and get it quite hot.
  
  
  2. Put in half the garlic; stir rapidly until it whitens, then quickly...
  
  
  3. Put in half the onion; stir rapidly again, turn the heat down to medium after 20 seconds or so
  
  
  4. Stir for a few minutes until the onion gets translucent. Don't let it burn.
  
  
  5. Put the resulting stuff oil/garlic/onion slop into the big-ass bowl
  
  
  6. Pour in some lemon juice, perhaps amounting to two or three tablespoons (make sure this is getting poured into the breadcrumbs, and not directly into the oil, so you don't get spattered)
  
  
  7. Give the stuff a minute to cool alongside its previously refrigerated big-ass bowl brethren
  
  
  
  

Roll up your sleeves, put your less-nice pan right next to your big-ass bowl on the counter. Mix up the ingredients by hand, massaging the turkey gently into a wonderfully fowl glop in which everything seems to be evenly mixed. If it's really shiny and slippery, add more breadcrumbs. If it feels almost grainy and seems to come apart pretty easily, add more oil. It should not feel overly oily but should hold together without effort.

Grab little handfuls and roll 'em into balls, putting 'em into the less-nice pan. Use whatever size you like, though I tend to make 'em probably a 1.25 to 1.5 inches in diameter.

Fill the less-nice pan with water until the meatballs are perhaps two-thirds submerged.

Put the less-nice pan on a burner, put it on high until you get a boil, then back off to medium; cover the pan if you've got a big-enough cover (not essential, but helpful if available). Use a spatula to flip the meatballs every five or ten minutes; treat them as if they were burgers, meaning flip them by scraping the spatula on the pan underneath them, because they could stick to the pan and you want to keep the meatballs intact.

While that's going, you can move on to the other things and be confident that by the time everything else is ready, the meatballs will be ready too.

Veggies and Sauce

Get the pasta water going. Put plenty of olive oil and salt in the water. I assume you can handle the pasta from here.

In the good (iron, right?) pan, pour a good bunch of olive oil. Remember not to cheap out on the yummalicious fattiness. Get it way hot.

Put in the rest of the garlic, stir quickly letting it whiten but not burn. Then put in the onion (whatever's left of it, depending on your flavoring choice). Stir quickly, reduce the heat after 30 seconds or so (to medium or med/hot), keep stirring. You want the onion to go translucent and ideally do not allow the garlic to burn.

Once the onion is translucent and you're getting hungry from the smell, toss in the other veggies. Stir 'em around and let the zucchinis be your guide for readiness: I like to keep them frying at a pretty high temperature (stirring all the while, of course) until the majority of zucchinis have gone mostly soft (they'll start to appear as if they are soaking through or something, which indicates that their softening and cooking through).

At that point, pour in the sauce. When you start getting bubbling in the sauce, turn the heat down and shoot for a simmer.

Let the sauce simmer for a few minutes, stirring periodically. If you've got fresh basil, wash it and shred it while you're waiting.

Turn the meatballs off and plop them into the sauce/veggies. Add basil now if that's what you're using for seasoning.

Let things go for a couple minutes more, until you're confident that the sauce is evenly hot and (if used) the basil's been in for a few. Turn it off.

You're done. Chow down.

I Like This Article Because It's Wrong

In reference to the enjoyable article "I Like Unicorn Because It's Unix".

I don't take any pleasure in claiming that the intelligent, read-worthy author is wrong. I don't even really mean it; the article has plenty of good stuff to say and has been a useful point of reference for me in weeks past. I have one point with which to quibble, and it may have been right when he first wrote it.

But, lest anyone else be led astray, here's the issue:

Most notable is the following call to select(2):

ret = IO.select(LISTENERS, nil, SELF_PIPE, timeout) or redo

This blocks until one of three things happen:
...
2. Some notable error state occurs on the file descriptor in SELF_PIPE (like when it’s closed), in which case the child’s side of the pipe is returned as an IO object. This really deserves its own essay, but I’ll take a quick shot: the IO object in SELF_PIPE is created in the parent process with pipe(2) (IO.pipe) before the children are forked off. The children then write on the pipe to achieve basic one-way IPC between child and master. It’s used here in the call to select(2) to detect the master going down unexpectedly – parent death causes the pipe to close. Unicorn children go down fast when their master dies.

That's not actually what happens.

SELF_PIPE is used in two different ways:

1. In the master process, the master writes to the pipe from signal handlers; it selects on the pipe in its main loop, such that signals will wake the master up in that loop.


2. In the child/worker processes, the original pipe inherited from the parent process is completely replaced by a new pipe; signal handlers in the child process close one end of the pipe, such that they interrupt the select referenced by Ryan Tomayko's blog as quoted above.

I admire Ryan Tomayko's blog and should he happen to stumble across this little article here, I hope he'll appreciate the tongue-and-cheek nature of the title. His article is more right than wrong, but that's not as much fun to claim, is it?

Henryk Górecki

I was pretty bummed to hear of Górecki's passing today.

Courtney and I first encountered Górecki's popular third symphony in her second (I think) year at Boston University; the BU symphonic orchestra was performing the third paired with Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste, and possibly along with Stravinsky's Symphony of Winds. We went primarily for the Bartok (and the Stravinsky, if it was really on the program; that sounds like a rather long program, but I remember that it really kicked a lot of ass so it's possible that they did indeed do all that together).

I recall being pretty captivated by the Górecki. But I was emotionally invested in the Bartok and stored up my energy and focus for that. When it got to the Górecki, I was tired and couldn't focus much more. That's how it typically works for me: save the mental energy for the piece I care most about, and let whatever wants to happen happen on the others. Often that means I space out or sleep through the pieces I'm not there to absorb. But the Górecki is pretty captivating stuff, and while I won't claim that I was immediately sucked in and energized or whatever (after all, the Bartok performance was quite engaging and I just didn't have it in me to care any more), the piece was nevertheless provocative enough to prevent me from falling immediately asleep.

All of which sounds insulting to the piece, which is not how it's intended. I seriously slept through large portions of concerts on a regular basis at that time; I was always overtired, and as much as I loved (and love) music I just couldn't fight the need for sleep, and concert halls filled with beautiful music make for a marvelous bedroom. Just ask Stravinsky regarding Schubert. In any case, I was all prepared to settle in and pass out for the next 45 minutes, and instead I had a reaction of "hey, what's this all about?!"

Since then it's become one of those special musical jewels that I really adore. I don't listen to it all the time. It's not necessary. It fills a special place that only needs to be visited once and while. The third movement in particular is so astonishingly beautiful and expressive, and it embodies (for me) what music is all about. When words fail us, music is there. The deepest aspects of our emotional lives are too rich to express verbally. That third movement gently rocks you with love while it breaks your heart.

Farewell, Górecki. Thank you for the sorrowful songs.