Saucy Meatballs

Look into my spice cabinet: the neat rows of white pepper, cardamom, ground cloves, paprika, and curries— they all suggest that here lives someone who must enjoy what fire and chemistry can do to raw foods. You may notice on closer inspection, however, that the seals on these vials of magical powder remain unbroken. In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I am not a gourmand, just someone who gets a frisson of pleasure from the aesthetics of perfectly lined up glass jars, small and squared off, uniform in size and shape, organized from lightest to darkest hue. Sometimes I’ll open the cabinet just to assign color names to the earthen tones. What a thrill.

Really, though, I want to want to cook. I have tools, even unusual ones, and pots and pans plus all the accouterments of a woman who makes busy in the kitchen. Likewise, I love to eat food from a domestic scene where steam and the scent of garlic intermingle with sips of wine, chatter with children tasked to peeling potatoes, and a little Sinatra on in the background. This is the idealized image of a home kitchen, but I have yet to realize it. Instead, whenever I attempt to prepare something that requires more than pouring Trader Joe’s tots and fish sticks on a cookie sheet and calling it cooking, my four-year-old will sneak off into a corner so he can poop in his pants, cover the coffee table with hundreds of very sticky stickers, or simply walk out the front door and down the steps to the street. But I’m being unfair: multitudes of mothers have lovingly prepared complicated meals while their preschoolers unwittingly attempted to drive them mad. The boy is not to blame.

I’d like to think that my resistance to cooking springs forth from the years I spent having to cook for my siblings while my single mother split her time between earning a living and becoming sober. When cooking is assigned as one more chore to be dutifully executed, it’s hard to derive any pleasure from it, and there are only so many times that a teenaged girl can turn perfectly good pork chops and burgers into something more akin to jerky and hockey pucks (respectively) before she decides it best to hang up the plastic spatula (which she half melted on the electric coil of the stove top) and go fetch slices of pizza from the corner deli instead. Again, though, I’m diverting in an attempt to avoid the truth, which is this: I like it best when food is prepared for me.

A kale salad and pork taco from Mixto, my trendy taco joint; slices from Tomato Pie, pizza as ever a perennial stand-by; a rotisserie chicken with hummus, pita, and marinated cabbage from Zankou Chicken, my Armenian family-meal fallback; grass-fed beef sliders and shoe-string fries from the Patty Wagon, our friendly neighborhood food truck parked at the Silverlake reservoir every Tuesday; the occasional elaborate set-up orchestrated by my mother-in-law, who unintentionally shames me into realizing that you can make food and keep kids alive at the same time (my husband and brother-in-law as living proof); even my husband, who will make the time to combine fettuccine with prawns, bacon, and asparagus so we can sit with wine and a lit candle after our son goes to bed. And so on. If I lift a finger, it’s to open my wallet, wash my mother-in-law’s dishes, or offer a grateful, sated, bedroom thank you to my sexy, stove-fluent husband.

But we’re moving in two days, and I have defrosted a one pound square of ground beef from the freezer with the great intention of trying to use up as much food as we can so we don’t have to move it. My husband, the one with a knack for fixing meat, is now busy fixing the leaky pipes in our new house (insert your own innuendos about preparing meat or laying pipe here), which leaves me with ground round, too much guilt about wasting food, and renewed aspirations about wanting to want to cook. I can try, I think. I grew up with meatballs, and I have the flashes of memory to prove it: the clean iron flavor of raw chuck, stolen from the metal bowl; the image of my grandfather’s hands pressing breadcrumbs and egg through the combed red strands, the smell of onion and beef as the meatballs were first fried in olive oil before being plunged in marinara. I think I can make those. But can I do it without a recipe?

Improvisation is something that requires a knack, best for people comfortable with spontaneous jazz hands and not, perhaps, for people like myself who live and die by precision, or who, at least, get great pleasure from the Things Organized Neatly Tumblr account. Nevertheless, any ninny who has ever grown up watching other people cook knows that onion and garlic go well with beef. This ninny knows that. I figured that if I took memories from my childhood and combined them with a very basic knowledge of flavor combinations, I could ensure that the meatballs and sauce will at least taste good, if not great. But the process from start to finish always takes longer than expected when you're learning as you go.

It started with the very bowl for kneading the meat, and the first note of improvisation was struck. All of our bowls were packed, but our fruit bowl— large, glass, and non-porous— did the trick. Besides and anyway, the bananas were beginning to mottle beyond a satisfying ripeness, the apple gave a pithy thud when flicked, and the last remaining pear was sliced for preschool lunch. Into the former fruit bowl went the bloody cube of chopped meat (organic!); an egg (a dozen purchased just for this task; they will be fun to move); a generous, unmeasured pour of Italian herbs from one of the underused jars in the spice cabinet (I call the color "dark mood"); and a cube or two of conveniently packaged frozen garlic mush (usually admired in the door of the freezer when fetching tater tots). And then I ran into my first snag: I had no onion in the house. Manuel, my octogenarian, Panamanian downstairs neighbor had a tape of Argentinian music for me. I went down to grab it on the off chance he had some cebolla. He did. I told him I'd bring meatballs when they were done.

The second snag: The bread crumbs in my pantry expired two years ago (They were unopened, so I thought maybe, but no. They smelled like a mummy's linen wraps, or so I imagine). God dammit. So then I had to run off to Gelsen's (so close, so expensive), where I picked up some "Italian Style" bread crumbs, another onion for the sauce, a bottle of cabernet (for the sauce and for getting a little sauced), lime juice (always, at the very least, keep ingredients for margaritas on hand), some hoagie rolls (meatball hero!) and some basil, because there should be some sort of green stuff stewing around in the marinara. An hour later, finally, I added a dump of bread crumbs to the bowl, some salt and pepper, too, and I proceeded to knead, which, on the one hand, is enjoyable as a textural, tactile gush, and on the other hand, disturbing to know that meat went under my fingernails. Once the olive oil was nice and hot in the skillet, I rolled perfectly formed meatballs and set them to spitting in the pan, at which point my husband did come up behind me with a pinch for my ass and some innuendo about how well I was tending to the balls. See, this cooking stuff isn't so bad after all.

The sauce and its suspension of crumbled and whole meatballs are eventually left to simmer on the stove as my husband and Dexter's adopted gay uncle (Why mention orientation? Because I've always wanted a gay uncle, so I think my son is lucky) pack our belongings while the boy runs around in nothing but Thomas the Tank Engine briefs, hiding in every unclaimed cardboard box. In the interest of summarizing the rest of the meatball experience for you, reader, while not killing you with the details or jumping to any conclusions: the sauce wasn't half bad, although the paste added was too much. I saw my grandfather use paste. I thought I was supposed to, but the sauce reduced to a sort of sludge, so that the minute I stirred, all my carefully-formed, pan-seared meatballs made Bolognese out of the marinara, just like that.

In the end, we sat down with what I hadn’t already drank from the bottle of cabernet, and my husband and son’s gay uncle feigned disgust to tease me, but uncle couldn’t keep a straight face (Sorry, so sorry for the pun). They knew I worked hard to act like a cook, adopting the Stanislavsky method to immerse myself in the role. They dropped the joke quickly, having no stomach for even pretend cruelty. We tried to eat meatball wedges with provolone, which actually resembled something more akin to Sloppy Joe’s. I will deliver a bowl of sauce to Manuel before we move and apologize for the lack of meatballs, but he will find the Bolognese satisfying, if not intentional. At lunch today, as I tried to wrap this whole experience up using the exact combination of words— things arranged neatly (yay!)— I ate half a pepper steak sub from Giamela’s, my once-a-year calorie overindulgence, and I have to admit that it was so quick, so tasty, and so…effortless.