/ck/ - Food & Cooking

So, I haven't had a lot of time to take pictures with my hands full on cooking, forming the meatballs and making phone calls to get some wonderful hand made spaghetti delivered.

I reason why I made spaghetti and meatballs was because this dish remains for me, the iconic Italian pasta dish that nobody in my bloody childhood seemed to do right, it the spaghetti wasn't overcooked or undercooked, the meatballs were just bland, soggy anemic lumps of crap. So I made my own.

Alright, spaghetti and meatballs. Let's start with the pasta itself, I know I'm a cop out because I didn't roll my own dough and didn't make my own pasta but it's been a busy week and I can't afford a pasta making machine. However, I did find a nice Italian bistro down the road which does do fresh pasta and they were quite happy to offer to sell me some of the ones they made, so homemade pasta? No. Fresh pasta? Yes.
The tomato sauce I made consists of tinned tomatoes, a dash of white wine, vegetable stock, shallots, garlic and basil. Dice the shallots, halve the garlic and sauteed them briefly, deglazed the pan with white wine, added in vegetable stock, tomatoes, basil and allowed it to reduce.

The meatballs I originally planned to make with a 50% mixture of beef and pork but local supermarket's gone Muslim on me and didn't offer pork mince because "it might offend the Muslims". So I opted for meatballs made with beef, breadcrumbs and added finely diced chorizo (for that extra spicy and fragrant kick), garlic, parsley, Parmesan cheese and a dash of Worcestershire sauce. Then I pan-fried the lot till they were golden brown, threw them in the oven for another 10 minutes with a simple tomato sauce and they were ready to serve.
To garnish, I topped it with some more Parmesan cheese immediately after plating to give the cheese on top a little bit of time to melt.