Poison Meatballs

I love Meatballs—making them and eating them!  My daughters, on the other hand, would prefer to chew on tinfoil (after having a mouth full of cavitites filled) than to eat meatballs.

     Savannah’s hate affair began almost immediately after her first bite of one.  I remember her wrinkling up her tiny nose, stomping a little foot and demanding to know what I had put in them. “They taste just like poison”, she howled after one bite. (I’m not sure how she would know that, since to my knowledge I had never fed her poison before.) Sierra, always a suspicious child, brought her fork to a screeching halt mid-air and starred me down like a prison warden until I agreed to put it in writing that, Nooo I did not put poison in the meatballs. Even to this day Savannah will not and can not be bribed into eating one, and now, almost twenty years later, Sierra still raises a suspicious eyebrow to any meatball she meets.
     Enter The Big Guy into the picture…this is a man who has never met a meatball he doesn’t like.  While the kids where crying at the dinner table because of the poison meatballs on their plates, he was poking them down the old pie hole faster than a televangelist can poke dollar bills into his pocket. “Do I look like I’m dying here?” could be heard between bites.
     My toddlers turned into little girls, who turned into teenagers, but there was no turning them into meatball eaters.  Instead they went on hunger strikes whenever the poison meatballs appeared on the table.  I just learned to live with the accusations as I subconsciously practiced the deposition that I would surely be required to give, in the event that one of my family members turned up….well you know…poisoned.
     These days The Big Guy still loves his meatballs and requests them for dinner on a regular basis. And I still love making them.  Putting my hands into that mixture of raw meat and herbs and crumbs and seasonings and whatever else and then forming it into a ball, is what I love most about meatballs.  But it’s just not the same anymore  (insert a heavy sigh here).  Whenever I bring that goo together I think about those days so long ago, when two little girls sat at the dinner table and objected to my meatballs—certain that my hands were molding a giant poison pill and that I was trying to coerce them into swallowing it. Oh how wrong they were! Those crazy kids…mistaking love for poison.

This is The Big Guy’s all time favorite Spaghetti and Poison Meatball recipe.  It’s a bit time consuming to make but worth every minute.  If you have some moral issue against using veal, substitute it for ground beef and plug your ears for a second.  Shhh...the secret to a tender, melt in your mouth meatball is veal.  I've included a variation for Stuffed Meatballs, (my fave) which are delish and oozing with cheese!  But hey, you could stuff cheese into a turd and I'd be tempted to eat it!  Go to the "Pasta" tab at the top of this page to view it.