Cooking for beginners.
On the way home, I thought about what I wanted to cook for dinner. Inspired by a friend’s tale of having made “tomato burgers”, being really big meatballs baked in passata, I thought meatballs might be the way forward. We didn’t have any spaghetti, but that was fine – linguine is about as good in a pinch – and I got to thinking, how do I make meatballs, and what kind of sauce should I make?
Meatballs, it turns out, are the easiest thing to make even if you’re improvising. You shape meat…into balls. I added an egg to help as a binder, and some very finely chopped onion and seasoning, but otherwise it was like making balls of meat. I can’t dress it up as anything more advanced than shaping spheres from minced flesh. I’m sorry.
For the sauce, I was momentarily tempted to buy passata ready to go. But then it occurred to me that we have tinned tomatoes, tomato paste, and access to a blender. It almost seemed like I was pre-equipped to make my own damn sauce. So; olive oil, garlic, onions, a bit of frying, a yellow pepper, more frying, tomatoes and paste, a big chunk of pecorino chopped up into little bits, and a handful of black olives, more heating, stuck in the blender and given a thorough homogenising, seasoned and reheated – sauce.
Interestingly, it came out orange, presumably from the cheese and pepper in there. It looked like I’d made a carrot-based soup more than sauce for pasta.
Anyway, it was very tasty.
This weekend my good friend Allan gets married, so I will be up in Scotland helping to celebrate the happy union of he and his fiancee. Everyone say it with me now:
Awwwwwwww.
