Meatballs with Potatoes and Spinach Salad

Okay everyone, did you know spaghetti and meatballs is an American invention?  I am sure many of you know that.   I knew spaghetti and meatballs is not Italian cuisine but often didn't admit it to myself.  Despite its inauthenticity, I love the dish, and I feel guilty because I know it isn't real Italian cuisine.   But hey, meatballs are real and Italian AND Silver Spoon has several recipes for us to try.  So we will.

The first meatball recipe up is meatballs with potatoes.  The recipe asks to boil and mash two potatoes and combine them with raw hamburger meat while they're still hot, yikes, I think, bacteria?  What do I know?  So I mash and let the hamburger meat fly, add a beaten egg and a couple of slices of chopped up mortadella.  The recipe also tells us to season with salt, pepper and parsley.   I always use Himayalan pink salt and really really suggest it.  After all this, I coat with bread crumbs.   A warning, these meatballs are very tender, almost fragile.

Of course, we get to fry the meatballs in the SS's favorite way: butter and olive oil.  This is the part the story where your champion of the kitchen (me again) frets about meatballs falling apart.  Folks, I don't know if I should have coated more with bread crumbs or used a a bigger egg, but these guys looked like if I blew on the pan I was going to have American chop suey instead.  I stepped away and let them really develop a crust over low heat, while I wrung my hands for a good five minutes.  Meanwhile, I directed my BFF to make the spinach salad.

The spinach salad is very simple, spinach plus mushrooms sprinkled with lemon juice.  My best friend performed the slicing of the mushrooms and washing of the spinach while I combined some more lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper to make a dressing.  She has dinner here a lot, as it turns out.

When I turn back to the meatballs, they are way more stable.  My advice is don't move them too much when cooking, flip them only to cook the sides and middle evenly.  By the way, I should learn to follow my own advice more with cooking the protein portions of any meal I cook.  I am an over flipper from way back.  It makes meat tough,  and less juicy.  I am really retraining myself to be patient with food and not flip it so much, jeez.  Learning patience is a theme emerging through cooking The Silver Spoon, and I really appreciate it and struggle with it at the same time.

The results were excellent.  These meatballs were decadent, moist and fiancé approved.  I didn't even miss the pasta! The crumb coating with pink salt was a great contrast to the tender quality the meatballs have because of the potatoes.  Even the spinach salad was greater than the sum of its parts.   Liberate yourself from expensive salad dressings that are full of chemicals; all you need is olive oil, lemon and a brisk stir with The Silver Spoon.