Meatballs

Let’s talk meatballs.  Being Italian-American, I know a thing or two about them.  Amongst my peeps, It’s its own food group, along with pasta (aka macaroni for us old schoolers).  Not sure there is a better food pairing than macaroni and meatballs.

Growing up it was dinner twice a week: Sunday and Wednesday.  You made enough every Sunday to have it again on Wednesday. 

When I went to work for IKEA, I discovered this thing called a Swedish meatball.  Everyone raves about IKEA’s meatballs.  Say to anyone that you work there and they will ask you about their meatballs.  Do you get a discount on the meatballs? Do you eat the meatballs every day? How great are those meatballs?

Ummm. Yes, I get a discount on the meatballs.  No, I don’t eat them every day.  And I wouldn’t know, since I never had one.

That’s right.  I worked there for 22 years and never ate a one. Call me a meatball snob, but there is only one kind of meatball.  And that’s the kind by the Italians, and it’s covered in red sauce (gravy for us old schoolers), not some brown, gunky gravy. 

You eat it with pasta, or on a roll.  Or in tiny form in Italian Wedding Soup. Not with mashed potatoes and lingonberries.  What is this heresy? I will not betray my fellow paesanos (loyalty being an ingrained Italian trait) by eating this not a meatball meatball. 

In fact, they ought to change the name.  Swedish meatchunks.  Swedish meatnuggets.  Swedish meatbites. Too bad the Italians didn’t trademark the word meatball.

Oh well.  Be that as it may, meatballs may abound, but it’s the Italian meatball that is the real deal.

But this isn’t about that, this is about some funny things that have happened in my life as it relates to meatballs.  One would wonder what could be so funny about meatballs. Here goes.

One night, when Ernie and I were in our early twenties, newly married and living in Boston, friends of ours came up to visit.  We all went out and had a great time.  In your twenties that is code for had a little too much alchohol.  Now, in our sixties, that would be code for had a nice meal out at 5 o’clock, home by 7, and in bed by 8.

We must have gone somewhere on the swanky side because we were in nice clothes.  When we got home, I went into the bedroom to change.  Suddenly, I heard Ernie yell from the kitchen, “Mary, there are meatballs in my shoes!”.  I yelled back, “What?” Because I was certain I heard him wrong.  He yelled back, “There are meatballs in my shoes”! 

Perplexed, convinced he had way too much to drink and was hallucinating, I walked into the kitchen.  And there it was.  Meatballs in his shoes.  One of his nice, black Oxford dress shoes was sitting squarely on the counter.  And it was overflowing with sauce and meatballs.  Nearby was the container of sauce and meatballs.  All I could do was burst out laughing. 

To this day, we have no idea how his shoe ended up on the counter, nor how he managed to spill the meatballs and sauce into them.  He clearly went into the fridge for a snack and somehow that was the end result.

The next and final funny thing that happened in my life with meatballs was on the day of our son’s christening.  We had a christening party for him of course.  We kept it small and intimate, about, oh 60 people.

My mother came over to help me make the meatballs.  One thing you should know, Italian-Americans don’t cater their parties.  Bring in somebody else’s food? That costs alot of money? And that food isn’t going to be near as good as your own food? No way. No catering.  We prep.  We cook.  We get all hands on deck. 

So, my mom of all people suggested that we try baking the meatballs instead of frying them, per usual.  She thought it would be a time saver and she had heard of people baking them and that they came out good.  That was problem number one, in our opinion.

The real problem however, was the parsley.  Or rather, the preparation of the parsley. I had bought some lovely fresh, Italian parsley.  I had recently gotten a manual food processor and I thought it would be easier to run the parsley through that vs hand cutting it.  Little did I know, that that process would yield a very bitter tasting parsley.

We made the meatballs.  We threw them in the sauce.  The sauce was also going to be used for a baked ziti dish.

The day of the party arrived, I bit into a meatball and almost vomited.  It was horrible.  I can’t even describe to you the bitter flavor they had.  Only suffice it to say, they were inedible.  I tried the baked ziti.  That got polluted too, from the sauce that the meatballs simmered in.

No one ate them or the ziti of course after taking a taste.  Word had spread pretty fast. I started apologizing to everyone about the meatballs. I was mortified.  When I explained to various folks how we prepared them, it was one of my uncles who determined that it was likely the food processor that caused some kind of reaction in the parsley.

The explanation helped a little, but I felt like my street cred as a good Italian-American cook was on the line.  I might have had to turn in my card.  But that old saying about getting back up on the horse after it throws you came to mind.  And it wasn’t long before another occasion for a party arose and I looked forward to redeeming myself, my reputation, and my meatballs.

That food processor? Those blades never touched another parsley leaf ever again.