ramtops

Buried in the back of the freezer, I found 2lbs of sausagemeat, clearly left over from the festering season, and never used. I’m diabetic, and shouldn’t really eat sausage rolls, so I poddled up to the butcher and bought 300g of lean minced beef, and on Sunday we had a meatball cook-in.

Italian: Pete manfully combined the meats, then divided the combination into two equal parts. The first part had garlic, herbs and season added and was divided into walnut sized pieces. I chopped onions, carrots and courgettes, and more garlic. I made a sauce with half of a 99p (huge) tin of tomato paste, and a good splash of red wine. Bunged the lot in the slow cooker, left for four hours. Gorgeous – made 9 portions.

Moroccan: The other half of the meats was seasoned with some Ras el Hanout, while I chopped red peppers and onions into thin slices, and cubed three yellow courgettes. I sautéd these down very slowly, with a teaspoon of honey, some olive oil, lots more garlicm and some sesame seeds. Then added the meatballs, a tiny bit of red wine (as it was too hand), and some seasoning. Left on a slow simmer for about an hour. Also made 9 portions.

The empty shelf space in the freezer is disappearing!

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

In the freezer was a pound of sausagemeat, and pound of pork mince, both left over from Christmas. I fetched them out last night, with the intention of making some meatballs, but when I came to think about it, I decided they needed some beef mince too, so we hurtled over to Aldi (15 minutes the quickest way, or 20 if you go through the park – we went there the slow way, and back the quick) to fetch some. We took the shopping trolley, and also bought 4 bottles of fizzy water, a bag of peppers, some spaghetti, a bottle of cooking wine, some onions and some rhubarb. Oops.

Once returned, I diced two carrots, half a courgette, two sticks of celery, a red pepper, and sliced 1.5 onions and four cloves of garlic. Put that all to saute in some olive oil, while Pete combined the three lots of minced meat with some seasoning, and the very last of the dying basil plant.

It made 39 meatballs, which I fried off before putting them in the slow cooker. Then I added some sliced mushrooms to the veg mix, a carton of passata, a glassful of red wine and a dash of water. Brought it to a simmer and poured it over the meatballs. Just have to wait now :)

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

As my loyal reader will have noticed, we’re moving house in a few weeks. And we have to empty the freezers. We just about eaten our way through all the prepared meals, so now we’re starting to make inroads on the raw ingredients.

For some reason, we had 3lbs of sausage meat in the freezer; I suspect it was left from Xmyth, when I would have planned and failed to make sausage rolls. So out came 2lbs, and 1lb of mince. Pete combined these with some allspice, ground dried ginger, black pepper, salt, fresh thyme, sage, majoram and savory, and a teaspoon of lazy garlic. That made 53 small meatballs.

In the meantime, I sliced up two red and one yellow pepper, and sautéd them down with 1.5 thinly sliced red onions. Bunged that in the slow cooker, then set to frying the meatballs in batches. They went in the slow cooker too.

Then I tipped the oil out of the frying pan, and added a jar of tomato salsa (well, why not? – it needed eating!), a glass of red wine – the end of a bottle that had, inexplicably, not been drunk, and the last of the lazy garlic. And a generous teaspoon of chilli flakes. All into the slow cooker, with a bit of water.

It smells gorgeous, and will make lots of meals.