On top of spaghet-teeeee....

I have been tinkering with a recipe for meatballs for over a year now.  It's a very simple 'mix everything together and throw into slow cooker' type of recipe.  Which suits me as I am no master chef.  Due to the Colonel eating solids, I also recently purchased a food processor, so am now experimenting to see how much I can get away with using it, rather than using my hands like a chump!

So here we go...

Into the food processor bowl went:

1 onion cut into big chunks
1/2 cup of a mix of macadamias and pistachios (recipe calls for pine nuts, but left over pistachios and macadamias was what I had, so in they went)
4 cloves garlic (recipe calls for 2 but we live in Korea)
1 tsp dried rosemary (don't have fresh...see previous post)
2 tsp fennel seeds
Leftover chunk of bread (recipe calls for 2/3 cup breadcrumbs)
1/4 cup parmesan
zest of 1 lemon
1 egg
500g pork mince (could use beef, or a mixture of both) - I added the meat after I had whizzed everything else as I didn't want to cut the meat up any finer than it already was.

The mixture that resulted did not look particularly appealing.  However, the onion minced right down, which helped to bind everything together.  I'm too lazy to dice my onion finely enough normally, so this was a big improvement on the last batch.

I find that no matter how patient I try to be, my meatballs always get slightly bigger as I progress through the mixture and become bored of rolling meatballs.  I think this time the Colonel woke up from her nap, so speed became paramount.  Once rolled, into the fridge for 20 mins.

Although the recipe doesn't say so, I brown the meatballs in a pan before throwing them into the slow cooker.  The recipe says to use a big bottle of tomato passata, but I tried it with a bottle of spicy arrabiata pasta sauce and a big slosh of red wine.

Something like six hours later, dinner.

Verdict:  Pistachios a big yes.  Spicy pasta sauce an improvement on plain passata.  Convenience of food processor did make meatball construction faster and more a even consistency (which was nice as they normally break apart a bit, mostly because I don't chop the onion very well). 

One idiosyncrasy of making this with minced pork bought in a Korean supermarket was that it is ground for use in dumplings, so had a very fine consistency to start with, let alone after I put it into a food processor.  So while it tasted pretty good, it was like eating Italian dumpling meatballs.  Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a little *ahem* odd....