Cooking with Friends and Sicilian Meatball Comfort Food

Greta Garbo

There's nothing like cooking with friends to warm cold winter days, be it cooking for a gang (Superbowl party?) or just throwing things together to share a meal with a pal. Cooking with others goes back to pre-history when we huddled around fires in caves.  

My friend Catherine has been a great friend for many, many years and one of my favorite cooking pals.  She looks like Greta Garbo,  is nearly 6’ tall with inch-long eyelashes and naturally curly hair. Back in the day, Woody Allen tagged her to do a cameo as Garbo for Zelig  (when the real Garbo turned him down).  When I first met her I thought she was aloof, but realized it was her Slavic nature -- her beauty and her height that gave that false impression.  She is warm and funny and we became best friends.  I still call her Catherine the Great because she does have that regal carriage.  

She visited me often in the country, always bringing a sheaf of recipes to try and whatever she needed to make them.  We were polar opposites in the kitchen, she was organized and methodical and I was a messy whirling dervish (still am),  yet somehow we got along beautifully, cooking and telling stories -- usually drinking lashings of wine as we worked!

One weekend she brought a cookbook with her called Comforting Foods by Norman Kolpas.  In it, famous chefs shared their at-home favorites and the proceeds of the book went for a good cause...Project Open Hand in San Francisco (they provide healthy meals for those in need).  The recipe for Sicilian Burgers was in this book. I have made it a million times since, as burgers grilled outside, as meatloaf and as meatballs. All of them are spectacular and the meatball version is indeed comforting and ridiculously flavorful on cold winter nights. It will become a favorite of yours too. 

Sicilian Meatballs based on Comforting Foods recipe with Mushroom Tomato Sauce

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 


1 finely minced onion 


1/2 cup dry white wine 


¼ c sweet Marsala wine 


1 small bay leaf 


1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 


1 teaspoon salt 


1 ½ pound ground beef (I use Grazin Angus Acres grass fed and delicious!) 


4 pieces of smoky bacon chopped

1 large egg plus 1 egg yolk, lightly beaten 


1 cup bread crumbs,

¼ pound grated Romano cheese 


1 c  chopped fresh parsley 


½ c chopped fresh basil 


Heat 4 tablespoons olive oil in small nonstick skillet over medium high heat. When hot, add onions and cook until translucent, 3 to 4 minutes. Add wine, Marsala, bay leaf, 1 teaspoon pepper and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Heat to a boil, then simmer until most of liquid evaporates, 9 to 10 minutes. Discard bay leaf. Transfer to a plate and refrigerate until cold. Gently but thoroughly combine ground beef,, chilled onion mixture, egg, bread crumbs, cheese, parsley and chopped basil.  Form into meatballs.  Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate up to several hours.  Sauté chopped bacon until fat is rendered and bacon crisp and remove. Saute meatballs in the bacon fat until cooked through and remove.

Mushroom Tomato Sauce

½ c dried porcini mushrooms from Marx Foods hydrated in water and 1 T cognac and chopped

1 28 oz can tomatoes (I use Muir Glen Fire Roasted)

1 small onion chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

2 T Cognac

1 cup red wine

½ t hot pepper flakes or to taste

few sprigs fresh marjoram

few sprigs of basil

Puree tomatoes if you wish or leave them chunky.  Sauté the onion and garlic in the reserved fat from the meatballs. Deglaze with cognac.  Add red wine and reduce.  Add the tomato sauce, mushrooms and their strained liquid and hot pepper and cook to blend the flavors.  Add the marjoram and cook a few minutes more.

Serve with the meatballs sprinkled with reserved bacon and basil on spaghetti and additional Romano grated on top if desired.

Aftelier

Please don’t forget to step over to Aftelier for sweet-scented Valentine’s presents (or just for yourselves -- because you’re worth it). Her perfumes, teas and chef’s essences for cooking are the best in the known universe… and that’s not hyperbole! 


Thanks to Gollum for hosting Foodie Friday

For the Marx Food's challenge,  I would use the wasabi to make a dish that is part of a centuries old Kaiseki Japanese feast,   I would use the wild boar in a barolo slow roasted masterpiece on a bed of creamy marscarpone polenta, and the huckleberries I would use in a dessert and as a sauce for quails... is that one too many???