What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [34]
Meatballs, when you think about it, are close cousins to Sari’s kaftes. As with kaftes, onion, herbs, and breadcrumbs are mixed with the meat, but meatballs are bigger and rounder, and are not on a stick. They’re also more likely to be beef than lamb.
Many a man’s favorite pastime involves balls—football, basketball, baseball, and soccer. One year for the Super Bowl, Patrick fashioned an enormous pile of meatballs to serve his guests, along with a mountain of spaghetti. Architecturally, it makes more sense to serve meatballs with polenta than spaghetti. The competing shapes of spheres and lines just don’t work well together, but it seemed easier to cook pasta and still keep an eye on the game. There were so many meatballs that we ended up freezing a dozen, which were much appreciated on snow-filled days when the roads were closed and there wasn’t much to eat around the house. Without waiting for them to thaw, we cooked them slowly in a skillet where they defrosted and cooked simultaneously, much like the hamburger discussed below.
With cooking, planning is often a problem: predictably there will be hunger, but frequently there’s no plan of attack. We don’t think ahead, hence all this heat-and-serve food, takeout, cold cereal, and worse. Our instant-food, eat-and-go lifestyle provoked one television host to come up with a recipe based on the lack of planning—a rare and crispy burger that starts out with frozen hamburger that you forgot to defrost.
“You take a one-inch-thick frozen burger and put it in an un-oiled pan over low heat,” he instructs. “The water from the thawing meat keeps it from sticking. Cook it like this for seven minutes on each side, then remove it from the skillet. Turn up the heat until the skillet is very hot, then put the burger back in and cook until it’s crispy on each side.”
This cook plops his burger on whole-wheat bread, adds ketchup and sliced sweet onions, salt and pepper. Sometimes he takes the bread and mops up the pan juices, something my father always did while my mother stood by, watching and appalled.
True, there are foods that men’s wives will not eat, and many men will cook those foods when they find themselves alone, like the aforementioned parsnips. Blood sausage and tripe are other examples of man-alone foods. It’s blood sausage that goes into one Englishman’s spicy sausage, salad, and spuds, a rather better-than-usual version of bangers and mash, especially if you add the salad.
“Actually, I cook any kind of sausage or bacon or ham, or a pork chop,” he admits, explaining that girls, his wife included in that category, don’t like that much meat. “And I drink more red wine than I normally would when they’re not around,” he adds.
“Then I make a special spicy salad—an all-herb salad with a whole bunch of minced cilantro, chives, parsley, rocket, and mint with olive oil and a couple of drops of balsamic vinegar over the greens.” This is a provocative salad because it’s so familiar and exotic at the same time, so unexpectedly complex. A salad recipe is needed in this chapter, and a spicy herb salad goes well with meat, especially grilled meat.
Cookbook author Cliff Wright also goes for blood sausage when he eats alone—that and quite a few other things no one else will eat. It might be Polish-style blood sausage bought from a local Polish deli, with a fried egg on top. Or tripe in tomato sauce or a pan-seared Muscovy duck breast. “Others would like that, but I can’t afford to buy more than one, so I usually have it when I’m alone. And my