Meatballs with Beef, Pork and Veal

Welcome to the new blog site everyone!  Are you as excited to be here as I am to have you here?  I hope so!  Are you ‘CRAZY excited’, as my 8-year-old niece would say?   Imagine my surprise when after importing all the posts from my Blogger site I realized that I’ve shared my “Gravy”/Marinara sauce recipe, and a quick tomato meat sauce/ragu recipe and a basic white sauce recipe but I never shared my meatball recipe?  What is wrong with me?  Um, don’t answer that please…

Please accept my most genuine apology for taking so long to post my meatball recipe.   I should probably remember to take my memory supplements more often.   I might remember things more often if I did.

You must know that these meatballs are a constant work in progress for me.  I’m truly never satisfied with them.  Oh, they’re good.  But I’m a typical, annoying chef who strives for perfection and until I achieve that, everything is a work in progress.  It seems one day I will make them and they’ll have great texture, and flavor, and the next time I make them, they taste different and the texture will be wonky.  I’m convinced it’s a couple of things.  The first thing that can affect how these will turn out is the meat.  I could have gotten some Rocky-Mooboa wanna-be meat cow that was jacked up on steroids and had twitching bulging mooscles.  That would explain why the meatballs could have an undesirable texture from time to time- they’re too firm.  Over mixing also makes them too firm!   The next time I go to make these I could have had meat from a cow that wasn’t so bent on having mooscles, maybe this cow would be more like Shermoon Clump (The Nutty Professor) and they’d have great texture and flavor.

Regardless of all possible factors,  I’ve tweaked this recipe more times than Joan Rivers has tweaked her face.  Well, maybe not *that* much.   I’m on a quest to make the perfect meatball and while I believe I’m still a long way off, these are pretty darn fantastic and I know you’re going to like them.  If they weren’t very good I wouldn’t be sharing my recipe with you.

Use high quality (grass-fed organic if possible) meats for this recipe.  The quality makes a big difference.  If you buy that ground beef in a plastic tube, you’re going to have bland, low-quality, potentially rock hard meatballs.  Especially if you can’t resist the urge to buy anything under 90/10.   They’re meatballs people.  They’re supposed to have a little fat.  They’re supposed to melt in your mouth.  They are not supposed to be a good substitute for a golf ball.  If you want rock hard, golf-ball like meatballs this is not the recipe for you.  If you don’t like veal, or think it’s cruel to eat veal, you do not have to use veal in this recipe but if you choose not to, your meatballs won’t taste as yummy as mine.  Plain and simple.

I have never written the measurements I use when I’m making meatballs.  This isn’t from a recipe I found in a book, but rather the recesses of my mind.  Which as one would expect is packed with many brilliant things; like this meatball recipe.  Also packed in the recesses of my mind is a poem about Cilantro and an Ode to Twinkies.  But I’ll save those for another day because we’ve got balls to make.  I mean meatballs.  Lord- I’m going to type myself into trouble.

My suggestion would be to follow this recipe as closely as possible the first time you make it, and then tweak the amounts of ingredients the next time you make it if deemed necessary.  You may prefer more Oregano, or less for example.

If you’re going to make these, you should probably have a pot of my Marinara Sauce simmering on the stove.  Make extra meatballs because you can make hot meatball sandwiches with the left over sauce and meatballs!  Mmmm.  Seriously one of the best sandwiches on the planet.