By DahlELama and The_Obvious
The two of us have lots in common: we both continue to love The Office long after everyone else has given up on it, we both revere our KitchenAid mixers, and we both think we’re better than everyone else at Scrabble. But for all our similarities, there will always be one huge difference between us: our backgrounds.
However, good friends and natural-born educators that we are, we’ve always made sure to try to teach each other a little bit more about where we come from. For instance, I, Dahl, taught T_O about the Sabbath, and he now he tries to get me to bail on it every Friday. And I, T_O Ochocinco taught Dahl about Easter and egg hunts, and she promptly invited herself to my family’s annual holiday celebration. Eventually, we discovered that our cultures do have one major thing in common: a reverence of balls.
The_Obvious
Like any good little Catholic kid, I was dragged to church every Sunday. Through all the mumbling of prayers, mouthing of words to hymns when the priest saw me not singing, and making paper footballs out of dollars destined for the collection plate, there was one motivating factor that made it all worth it: meatballs. Going to my grandparents’ house was a post-church tradition, and one that I enjoyed very much. The smell of the impending feast hit you as soon as you got to the front door and the star of the show were the meatballs. My grandma would keep a watchful eye over the pot as family members filed in. There were always a few sauceless ones set aside just for me. (I eventually grew out of my disdain for sauce and graduated from white to regular pizza, much to the relief of my mom.) Food and family were synonymous growing up and Sunday meatballs were very much an important part of that. Not long ago, I went to a restaurant that only served meatballs, and felt a pang of guilt and betrayal for eating anybody else’s but grandma’s.
I gave Grandma Obvious a call asking if I could have her recipe, which like most family favorites is not written down anywhere. I’m afraid the answer I received won’t be very useful to anyone though as the measurements she rattled off included: “2-3 pounds”, “some”, “a few”, and “a generous amount.” What I can tell you is that there is mixed chopped meat (veal, beef, and pork), egg, milk, bread crumbs, and parmigiano cheese. She fries the meatballs so they get a nice brown crust and finishes them in the oven. Noticeably absent is garlic and onion, so yes, this is not a spicy meatball. I suppose that’s relatively controversial as far as meatball recipes go, but with any comfort food, your first food memory tends to be what you prefer.
DahlELama
Unfortunately, because I’m an observant Jew who keeps kosher, both the pork and the combination of meat and dairy products make those lovely balls off limits to me. (But I would not turn my nose up at an all-beef kosher version; just throwing that out there.) Fortunately, we Jews have our own special balls which are 100% kosher. I speak, of course, of matzoh malls!
Like T_O, my grandmother was quite skilled in the kitchen, and although the 7,000-mile distance between us meant I only had her cooking a handful of times in my life, one of my favorite things that my father brought back to our American kitchen from her Czech-turned-Israeli one was her matzoh ball recipe. One of the great debates of the kosher kitchen is whether matzoh balls should be dense or fluffy, and my grandmother’s were as dense as can be. For a recipe for fluffier matzoh balls (and chicken soup to go with them), see TackyTick’s Passover post. For my grandmother’s matzoh balls, see below:
Savta’s Matzoh Balls
4 eggs
1 c. matzoh meal
1/2 c. oil
1/2 tsp. salt
boiling chicken soup/stock/broth/whatever (basically, whatever liquid you’ll be serving them in should be prepared first)
Mix all ingredients until smooth. Place in refrigerator for one hour (or freeze for 20 minutes). Roll into balls about an inch in diameter and drop into pot of boiling chicken liquid-of-choice. Cook partially covered for 40 minutes.
If you’re feeling ambitious and artsy, you can also try giving your matzoh balls some color using spinach, turmeric, or tomato.
So those are our favorite balls; tell us about yours in the comments!
DahlELama and The_Obvious are parents to two adorable chicks named Nuggets and General Tso, who are currently living with a foster mother in Connecticut. The chicks were taken away following a traumatic incident involving The_Obvious and some brutally decapitated Peeps.
