FRIDAY

I planned to make a simple partially-homemade dinner: handmade meatballs, personally-seasoned garlic bread, doctored spaghetti sauce, and whole grain spaghetti (from a box). A child of two working parents, my husband grew up on food-from-a-box-or-bag. When they had spaghetti and meatballs, the meatballs had been precooked and frozen, a jar of sauce was to be dumped on top, and of course frozen garlic bread. So, when my fibromyalgia flared up (or we just got ridiculously busy), we pretty much did the same thing to prepare what had once been my favorite meal.

Well, not tonight!

I have 1.25 lbs of 87% lean ground beef, a stale baguette, a jar of Progresso Meat-Flavored Sauce, “Heart-Healthy” whole-grain Spaghetti, 2 large eggs, freshly shredded Parmesan, a stick of butter, olive oil, cream cheese, salt, pepper, garlic powder, paprika, 2.5 cloves of garlic, and an onion.

I let the meat and eggs stand out to get closer to room temperature. Eventually, I got impatient and nuked the meat for 30 seconds at 40% power. This way, it won’t be too cold for my delicate hands. I plopped the meat unceremoniously into a small metal mixing bowl (mostly because I wasn’t sure what sort of ceremony it could possibly call for – maybe I should have used more of a flourish or shouted to the cats: “Aaaaand heeeeeeeere’s the meeeeeeeeeaaat!!!” But I didn’t. I just dumped it in.). I wasn’t sure whether 1 or 2 eggs would be called for. I couldn’t decide whether to add the freshly shredded Parmesan cheese to the meatballs.

My mother’s recipe involves a lot of “and then add some…” or “…a bit of…” and then doing something until “it starts to look about right.” This makes sense, given my grandmother always doctored her recipes to fit our larger audience, our fluctuating hunger (my brother was a growing boy and getting more adventurous in his food choices), and my mother’s electric stove (which must be said with a sigh of disappointment in how a daughter of hers can live like that). However, I don’t know how it should look oftentimes (especially when getting my grandmother’s old recipes). So I just fly by the seat of my pants.

But I did know things were going to get messy. So I stayed in my workout gear (to shower properly later, I naively planned), took out some paper towels, and began mincing 5 garlic cloves and 1/3 of the onion for the meatballs. I wound up with a pile about the size of a baseball… Okay, I don’t know exactly how big a baseball is. So I measured. The base of the cone-shaped pile had a 5″ diameter and was 2.5″ high, or 49 cubic inches, or 803 mL, or a hair over 27 fl. oz. That’s approximately a cup and a half of minced onion and garlic.

I put that momentarily to the side, removed what rings I could, pulled up my sleeves, made sure to play a show on the DVR I could enjoy (even if I’d have to watch the commercials!), and broke 1 egg onto the meat and mushed it together (I believe the culinary term is combined thoroughly). My mother uses jumbo eggs and thought I’d probably only need one egg but maybe two (they act as glue to hold the meatball together) – I had large and extra large, and sop I selected large so that there was room for a visibly significant part of one more egg if necessary. I mushed and mushed and decided I needed part of another. Based on how meat seemed to really respond more to the yolk, I used the yolk of the other egg. Mushed some more. Then dumped in the onion and garlic. Mush, mush, mush… When it was not yet completely combined, I added a pinch of salt, a few turns of pepper, and a shake of garlic powder. Then I mushed and mushed and mushed some more until it was thoroughly combined. I decided against adding something as unusual (to me) as cheese.

The plate I’d had the onion and garlic on now will hold the meatballs. I like small meatballs. My meatballs were between 2cm and 4cm (inch-lovers: stick to staying between 3/4″ and 1 3/4″) in diameter. All meatballs shrink, those that weren’t rolled with enough pressure or had a large piece of onion dividing it too much will probably fall apart and become one with the sauce. When rolling meatballs, think about you once-upon-a-time had rolled play-dough into balls using your palms, with occasional adjustments from your fingers. Use enough pressure to squish it a bit, but make sure it rolls around enough that it does become spherical in shape.

Now remember, I’m a little OCD and haven’t done this in a long time, so working up to this point took me an hour and a half. Washing my hands took another 15 minutes (tip: use dishwashing soap like Palmolive, squirting a couple of times, to remove the meat-fat that now covers your palms and don’t be afraid to scrape a bit using your fingers, then use your regular antibacterial kitchen soap).

Now, I clean up the counters a bit, because things can get messy, and took out the spaghetti pot and the cooking pan. I also chopped the remainder of the onion into small-to-medium pieces and tossed them into the pan. Since, in the past, I remember adding too much olive oil, I was more judicious with the EVOO before turning the burner on to Medium. I soon added more. And when that burned away, added more. Eventually, the onion became “glassy” (clearish and shiny). Then I added the meatballs. And more olive oil. And I browned the meatballs on ALL sides (I try to go for 4-sided pyramids to 6-sided cubes, depending on how they flop). Browning helps keep them from falling apart in the sauce. Eventually, I got tired of all that browning and decided it was enough (yes, I’m aware my OCD/perfectionistic-streak is very selective), so I dumped the sauce on top and swished it around. I closed the top for a few minutes and then checked again a couple of times, stirring. Once it was bubbling significantly, I brought the burner down to Low/Medium-Low. I stirred one last time and covered it, leaving the mixture to simmer for a half-hour to an hour with stirring each ten-minutes to quarter-hour.

Now, if I ran upstairs to shower, I’d be away from it for a half-hour straight. So I decided I’d just shower later. But sitting around a little sounded nice.

After half an hour, I figured why not get started on getting the garlic bread prepared, so all I have to do is pop it in the oven when Peter gets home? Sounds great, right? Wrong.

That baguette looked like a skinny little thing but she was rock hard and had an attitude. With my first slice, my blade glanced off the bread and “fillet”ed my left middle finger’s middle knuckle. At least, that was the doctor’s scientific term for that kind of laceration. I underestimated the injury and rocked the bread knife back and forth on top of the bread to get it through before realizing my left hand was burning and getting messy.

I called my friend, a nurse. She was getting Physical Therapy or driving home from it and didn’t answer her phone. I considered calling my mom, but she’d attempt to send me by ambulance regardless and make me feel like a Monty Python sketch comedian arguing, “It’s just a flesh wound!”. So I called my husband at work. He tried to put me on hold, so I just asked outright: “How deep does a cut have to be to need stitches?” Since it was still bleeding, he came home 10  minutes early and helped me turn off the burned on the stove (never, ever forget the stove, regardless of injury! You don’t want a serious injury AND a burned-down house!) before bringing me to urgent care. I stayed on the phone with my parents during the ten-or-so minutes it took him to get home, during which time I put a clean rolled-up paper towel over the wound and held it above my head.

The people at urgent care (All Well MD, on the corner of Snowden River Parkway and Oakland Mills Road) were great: I was seen quickly, my finger irrigated by dipping it into a urine specimen cup filled with saline solution and iodine, and (due to the “fillet” nature of the laceration) got a steri-strip instead of stitches (think medical duct-tape) and a full-finger-immobilizing splint (since the cut was on the knuckle, which I mustn’t use). I also got a tetanus shot. OUCH. I also got a prescription for antibiotics and my husband and I spent the next hour trying to get it filled at Target and eating dinner at Chicken Out (which was a challenge).

My Taped-and-Splinted Finger

When we got home, I threw away the offending bread, turned on the burner, finished off the sauce by crushing 6 cloves of garlic into the sauce and adding 1 tablespoon of cream cheese I had put into the microwave for 30 seconds on 40% power. I stirred it all in and let it simmer for fifteen minutes, then I turned off the burner and let it cool for a half-hour. Then Peter dumped it into tupperware for me and slid it into the fridge and we went to bed.

SATURDAY

Peter didn’t come home in time for dinner. Oh, well.

SUNDAY

It was Superbowl Sunday, and we had plenty of food at my friend’s house. (see my next post)

MONDAY

Yesterday morning, I had my follow-up with the doctor. He said my finger was healing nicely and gave me a shorter splint, with a few extra splints so I can replace it as needed over the next 7 days.

Smaller Splint

So, after having picked up 4 oval-shaped Italian-bread-like hard rolls at the store, I finally resolved to make Spaghetti and Meatballs with Garlic Bread for dinner. After getting home from work, I put the spaghetti pot on to boil, set the oven to 350, and began to peel 6 cloves of garlic (which wound up not being enough) and greatly soften 3/4 of a stick of butter. My husband cut the rolls for me, just in case.

Then I slathered each side with a thin amount of butter (about 1/2 of a tablespoon), at least 1 clove of crushed garlic, a sprinkle of garlic powder, and a sprinkle of paprika. By the time a half-hour was over, the water was at a roiling boil and I was wrapping each of the rolls (closed again, face-to-face) in aluminum foil and placing them on a baking sheet. They slid inside the oven and I began to put spaghetti in the pot.

Now I have 10 minutes. I opened the container of meatballs, turned the lid 1/8 of a turn (so the corners were halfway between the container’s corners), and popped it into the microwave for 4 minutes. After 4 minutes, I mixed and turned the meatballs and set it for 3 more minutes. After 3 minutes had passed, I mixed and turned the meatballs and set it for 2 more minutes.

Finally, I took the spaghetti off the burner and drained out the water, putting the spaghetti in a soup bowl, and removed the garlic bread from the oven, placing the cookie sheet on my wire cookie cooling racks. We each unwrapped 1 roll for ourselves and sat down to devour our meal. Peter used the fresh Parmesan cheese on his spaghetti. I’m not a fan of it and ate mine “plain”.

It was delicious, even so belatedly eaten. There were no leftovers, and we tucked right into our meal, so I have no photo to share.

AFTERMATH

There are still dishes to be washed. But, more insidiously, the scents of the dinner is still within us. My fingertips absorbed the garlic juices and smell quite garlicky. And our bodies rid themselves of toxins and waste through the common bathroom routes as well as through our pores. My brothers wife and my younger brother’s girlfriends have complained they sweat garlic for a week after consuming it. I really hope I smell fresh.

In any event, these meatballs have lingered for 5 days. (Or 8, if you start counting the day I went to the supermarket to get the ingredients.)

Of course, I’ll probably have evidence for much longer. And I’ll show it to you, if you dare suggest I give up bread or cooking. Lord-oh-lord, I love garlic and bread, spaghetti and meatballs is still my favorite meal, and cooking and baking are just way too fun to give up – they’re artistic mathematical kitchen experiments!

When my husband and I first moved in together (gasp, yes, we moved in together before we married, even in this day and age!) and I was starting the summer session of graduate school, I made attempts to cook and the results were pretty good. Then again, two years later when we married and bought our first home, I made more attempts at cooking. Then I worked my butt into exhaustion, we moved to Maryland, I got sick, and I let my husband take over more and more of the cooking duties.

Now I have been feeling better. So after my first forays into baking in December, I decided that my husband could do with some home cooking. The thing is, he grew up with parents who made short-cut from-the-back-of-the-can/box dinners, which are also the kind of thing we’ve subsisted on for nearly a decade. I grew up on meals in which the prepackaged parts were the pasta or spaghetti sauce, but otherwise I get a lot of recipes from my mother that involve adding “some” of this, until it starts to look right, a shake or two of that seasoning, a whole lot of garlic, mostly because the volume grew a lot as my baby brother got older and we still wanted some leftovers and then shrank back a bit. My maternal grandmother’s recipes were some of my favorites growing up. Unfortunately, my grandmother had severe enough Alzheimer’s by the time I was in college that my husband never met her and she was unable to communicate the recipes to me directly. My mother was recently able to scan most of the recipes my grandmother had written down, but most are in varying combinations of English, Czech, and even some German.

So my first attempts to cook were with my mother’s recipes. But now I wanted to try my hand at those recipes I’d wait weeks to taste again, until Babi came to visit (babička is Czech for grandmother; her name was Mila, but as our only Czech grandmother, we called her simply Babi). So, until they are translated, I’ve been utilizing the power of the internet to find the recipes of Czech expatriates or the progeny of Czechs. Like everything else, I did a great deal of comparing and contrasting and trying to determine what seemed familiar and what seemed authentic.

My first meal was my absolute favorite as a child: chicken paprikash (kuře na paprice). It’s a Hungarian favorite, but it also is very very Czech. It turned out very well – the meat was tender, the sauce a nice combination of mild flavor and bland smoothness, but I hadn’t warmed up the sour cream enough or lowered the temp of the sauce so the sauce wasn’t consistent.

The short version of the recipe is to chop up half an onion and saute it in a bit of olive oil until glassy, then take a chicken cut into pieces (breasts, thighs, drumsticks, etc.) or just several thighs, bone-in with the skin still attached (but some of the fat beneath removed), shake paprika all over it (both sides) and brown it on all sides. Then put in enough chicken stock to cover it and bring the stock to a boil, then simmer it for a few (3 to 4?) hours. Remove the chicken, let the sauce cool a little and thicken it up with sour cream you have brought to room temperature (otherwise, it looks a little chunky). Then add the chicken again and shake a little more paprika over it all, and serve over egg noodles.

Chicken Paprikash (Kuře Na Paprice)

The second meal I made was another favorite, but rarely made: roast pork loin (vepřová pečeně) with bread dumplings (houskove knedlíky). I really enjoyed it when my parents took my baby brother and me to Prague when I was a teenager. It was super-easy to make. However, I am not a beer person, nor did I know that beer brings out the saltiness of food. I just read that no traditional Czech meal was complete without a good beer like Pilsner Urquell. I may have had too much salt or the beer might have been a poor addition. Either way, less salt next time.

For pork loin, here is another short-version recipe. Get a 3lb bone-in pork loin, or just a pork tenderloin that is well-marbled with fat or at least has a thick ridge of fat on top. Preheat the oven to 325°F. Make a rub out of two or three cloves of minced garlic, half of a minced onion, a teaspoon of caraway seeds, and a tablespoon of olive oil, then rub that rub all over the loin. Place into a roasting or baking pan with 1 cup of water. Cover the pan with aluminum foil and bake in a preheated oven for 3 to 6 hours (longer makes it more tender). For the last half-hour or so, remove the foil. Serve with bread, bread dumplings (the recipe for knedlíky is below), or pan-roasted potatoes.

Czech-Style Roast Pork Loin (Vepřová Pečeně)

The third meal was Czech-style goulash (guláš), which is more like a thick stew, whereas Hungarian goulash is more like a soup (gulyás, in the hungarian sense, is known as gulášová polévka, or goulash soup, in the Czech Republic and Slovakia). It was okay (not extremely flavorful). I really enjoyed it for a few meals, but my husband only ate it once for dinner.  I’ll definitely make it again, but with potatoes for my very American husband rather than knedlíky). The recipe I used was from Czechmate Diary, as well as her recipe for a smaller batch of knedlíky, which tasted very much like the recipe I used the week before to go with the pork loin.

Czech-Style Goulash (Guláš) with Bread Dumplings (Houskove Knedlíky)

Houskove Knedlíky (Bread Dumplings)

Yields: 8 servings

Ingredients:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 1  to 3 cups milk
• 4 cups stale rye bread cubes

Directions:

1. Bring a large pot of very lightly salted water to a boil.
2. In a large bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar.
3. Make a well in the center, and pour in the eggs and ½ cup of milk. Mix it all together until smooth and soft/doughy but still holding its shape (add additional milk as needed – I used just under 2 cups).
4. Fold in rye bread cubes.
5. Use wet hands to form the dough into 3 loaves about 5” long and roll in a cheesecloth, tying the ends.
6. Gently lower into water, and gently simmer for 30 minutes, rolling about 3-4 times while cooking. Remove from the water and unwrap.
7. Cut with a bread knife into half-inch-width pieces.

adapted from a recipe on allrecipes.com

Note: If left to sit for more than 10 minutes, it may get stale.

Houskove Knedlíky (Bread Dumplings), before and after cooking