My mum’s homemade Italian meatballs are, quite simply, my favourite food in the world…ever!

(well, along with her homemade pizza and her homemade lasagne)

That’s quite a big statement considering how much I adore Indian food, Thai food, Malaysian food, Indonesian food, British food, Dutch food, French food (…I could go on) but none of those foods wrap their loving arms around you and clutch you to their bosom quite like my mum’s Italian meatballs.

Ingredients

• 500gr beef mince (or pork, or veal)
• Handful of breadcrumbs
• 1/4 of an onion very finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic
• 4 tbsp freshly grated parmesan
• 1 egg
• lemon zest (not too much, not too little – a couple of decent strokes with a zester)
• parsley
• S&P
• Olive oil
• Simplest form of this tomato sauce
• Pasta – I prefer tagliatelle or spaghetti

Take all the above ingredients, apart from the tomato sauce and olive oil, and mix well in a bowl. Squeeze it through your fingers and get those flavours really melding together.

Slap a bit of meat into your hand and roll them balls (ahem) you want to make them about the size of a squash ball or a touch smaller. If you don’t know what a squash ball looks like, just make them meatball sized.

Put them on a plate and stick them in the fridge to firm a little while you make your tomato sauce – I just tend to use a tin of tomatoes, an onion and garlic (maybe with a few soft Italian herbs in at the end).

Fry your balls in the olive oil – best to use a small pan and fry in batches, be generous with your olive oil so it comes up the sides of your balls and make sure it’s hot enough to brown them properly.  Pop them in your sauce as they’re done and let them simmer in there for 15 minutes or so.  Keep your sauce a bit moist as you go because you want it nice and saucy.  Then serve on your pasta of choice with lashings of parmesan and a bit of fresh chilli or chilli flakes if you feel that way inclined…est voila!  (or whatever the Italian version is).

Accessorise!

Although this recipe is dead easy, rolling your balls does take a wee while, but you can take some serious shortcuts with this recipe and still have an awesome meal in no time at all.  The easiest way is to buy some decent Italian sausages and just squeeze chunks of meat out the end of them straight into your pan and fry them instead of your balls.  I find ones with fennel in them work really well which kind of implies that fennel in the meatball recipe above would work an absolute treat as well.

A couple of nice variations on the tomato sauce are to add some red pepper (capsicum for those what speak funny), and/or some smoky paprika which really moves the goal posts, but still allows you to score (wow, twisted that metaphor all out of shape, huh?).  If you want to turn the goal posts upside down, take a separate pan, melt a couple hundred grammes of frozen spinach, add some cream and parmesan, perhaps a touch of nutmeg, and cook for 5 minutes and serve it on top of your saucy balls…yeah, sounds crazy dunnit, but it definitely giveth and does not taketh away!

You can also make this a bit more healthy – instead of frying your balls in a load of olive oil, you can fry them in a little olive oil, it just takes a little longer.  Alternatively you can brush with olive oil and bake them in the oven (less work too).  If you’re baking them, I’d get the oven quite hot to try and seal them quickly and brown them well.

So that’s you started on the road to comfort and happiness – sit back, relax and feel those reassuring arms wrap round you.

But also don’t forget to let me know what you do to your balls to make them taste delicious (sometimes I dip mine in chocolate, but that’s another post in a different blog ;o)