Saturday, August 3, 2019

We've moved!


Moving day went off without a hitch here at Mister MeatballI even managed to climb down off of that ladder unscathed. With the click of a button nine-plus years’ worth of recipes and stories moved from the original platform here at Blogger to this new one at WordPress.

Long story short, virtually everything at the old web address has been permanently moved to the new one.

Please take a moment and bookmark the new address for Mister Meatball. From now on every new recipe and story that I post will appear here. I will no longer be updating the old blog. 
SIGN UP FOR EMAIL SUBSCRIPTIONS
I'm happy to email you when a new recipe or story appears. Signing up is simple and FREE—no strings attached, I promise. 
Just go to the new homepage and enter your email address under “FOLLOW THE MEATBALL” at the top right. A confirmation email will follow. But you MUST CONFIRM to complete the process; otherwise you won't be subscribed. (Check your spam folder if the confirmation doesn’t appear in your inbox.)
CURRENT EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS: 
YOU MUST ALSO FOLLOW THE ABOVE INSTRUCTIONS in order to continue receiving email notifications. (Sorry about that, but the new platform won’t allow me to take current subscribers along with me.)
Thank you and see you soon at The New Home for Mister Meatball.
—MM

Thursday, July 25, 2019

R.I.P. Aunt Laura



She was a beloved, vibrant member of our family, and is already terrible missed.

I've shared a brief memory of Laura at the new home of Mister Meatball.

Thanks, and be well.

MM

Monday, July 15, 2019

Pasta with garlic scapes & walnuts

I get many garlic scapes each year and plenty find their way into a simple aglio e olio sauce with my pasta. I like swapping the garlic cloves for the scapes because it adds a really nice texture. One version also includes walnuts, which adds both texture and flavor. It’s a super simple pasta dish that you wind up craving over and over, so give it a try while the scapes are still around.

 Click here to read details at the new home of Mister Meatball.

Friday, June 14, 2019

Love smells


I'm like most humans. Certain smells get to me.

Drop a nice hunk of butter onto a red-hot skillet and before it has melted I am transported to my brother Joe’s apartment in Queens, watching as he carefully prepares the special pancakes that he knows I love so much. Pour out a glass of sweet red vermouth and at the first whiff my dear Uncle Dominic and I are sitting under his grapevine, telling stories and watching the bottle slowly drain as the summer sun sets.

Recently I awoke in the middle of the night to the smell of freshly mixed wet concrete. I love having the smell of freshly mixed wet concrete inside of me—because when it is inside of me so too is Uncle Joe

From the time I was old enough to carry a handful of bricks or move a filled wheelbarrow without assistance my mother’s eldest brother made certain to put me to work. He did not need a little kid working on his crew, but the man took his job as uncle (and godfather to me) very seriously.

After my father died Uncle Joe became even more committed to watching out for me, and by the time he himself passed I had become a pretty decent laborer. I remember the last summer that I worked with my uncle, the one where I had finally gotten the hang of not just mixing but properly laying down fresh concrete. It was a fairly large bit of sidewalk on a job in downtown Brooklyn and Neil, my uncle’s best concrete man, hadn't made it in to work.

“This one’s all yours, chief,” I heard that ever benevolent voice say from alongside me. “Time you took charge, don’t you think?”

I was by no means in charge, of course, but did manage to lay down a respectable bit of sidewalk, with the patient guidance of a man that I loved as deeply as any other. 

I’m proud to have the smell of his sand and gravel and mortar living in my brain forever.

My strongest scent memory by far involves my father. And a jar of Noxzema skin cream.

Every night, right around my bedtime, dad would be in the bathroom shaving. He always kept the door wide open and often could be heard saying this or that to my mother or to one of us boys. Before heading off to bed I would come up behind my father and tap on his leg or on the small of his back. He’d turn and bend down so that I could reach up and kiss him goodnight. His skin was smooth and moist and warm—and strongly smelling of Noxzema skin cream, his prefered beard-softening elixir.

It was my favorite daily ritual; I looked forward to it each and every evening.

On the early morning that my father died, the firemen and EMTs carried his body from our kitchen floor and into his and my mother's bedroom, where it would lay, covered in a clean bedsheet, until the undertaker came to collect it. As the rescue team carrying dad brushed past me, unsuccessfully attempting to shield a young boy's view, I could swear that I smelled the Noxzema that dad had shaved with only hours before.

It’s been 50 years since I last kissed my father goodnight, and I can still smell the Noxzema today.

I mean right now, at this minute, right here.

I can summon the aroma at will. Anytime. Anywhere. Just try me.

There it goes now.

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Men and their gardens



I come from a long line of earth tenders. A very long line.

That's Mister Bua you see there, grandfather to several of my cousins. He and Mrs. Bua lived in the ground floor apartment of Uncle Joe's house on Berriman Street in Brooklyn. A general contractor by trade, my uncle bought the property because it had enough room for his red dump truck and assorted building materials, space for lots of family cookouts in the summer, plus a good-sized garden where he could grow vegetables.

The tree that Mister Bua is tending is a fig tree, a healthy one too. The trellis on the left is for a squash-type vegetable that we call googootz (here's a link that explains), and the vast majority of the plants that I see are tomato plants.

I do not see a single weed. If you are at all familiar with vegetable gardening then you are likely as awestruck by this as I.

In a week or two I will have my own garden, a 24'x24' plot of earth, fully planted. Like my uncle and Mister Bua, along with many other men I grew up admiring for their skill and loving for their generosity of spirit, tending to a garden in summer is a need, not a choice. If I didn't have to nurse my fig trees (four now), tomatoes (a couple dozen plants, at least), googootz (always a crapshoot), garlic (230 or so this time around) and assorted other things I really do not know what else I would be doing from mid-June until September.

I know this may sound silly, or at the very least quaint, but looking at this photograph of Uncle Joe's garden makes me all kinds of weepy. Go ahead and click on the picture, enlarge it and really take a good long look. Mister Bua, a sweet man with a kind heart, is exactly where he wants to be at this moment and doing exactly what he needs to be doing. Every single thing coming out of the ground is lush and beautiful, tended to by men who care deeply for them. Hell, even the sheets drying patiently on the clothesline, possibly Cousin Ursula's, Mister Bua's granddaughter, make me nostalgic.

Things just could not be more perfect.

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

The last (and first) supper



Only once did my parents take me and my two brothers to a restaurant. It was on a Sunday afternoon, sometime after 1 o'clock, after dad had closed our family's fountain service store in Brooklyn for the day. Sunday afternoons were the only time he had off.

I remember my father putting on a suit and tie and my mother one of her nicest dresses and even a big hat. I don't recall what my brothers and I wore, but likely we were dressed in sport coats and good slacks that my mother had bought for us at one of the many clothing shops along Pitkin Avenue.

We left our second-floor apartment on Liberty Avenue in East New York, walked down the street to Shepherd Avenue, then all the way up to Atlantic Avenue, where the 22 bus ran through much of Brooklyn and deep into Queens.

We didn't own a car. I never saw my father behind the wheel of any vehicle, in fact, and my mother never learned how to drive.

I can't say exactly how old I was at the time but as dad passed shortly after I became a teenager my guess would be eleven or twelve. The only food I knew at the time was what my Italian-American mother and all of my Italian-American aunts and uncles cooked.

Other than inside my (very) extended family's homes there were only two other places where I had sampled any foods at all: Sal Abbraciamento's restaurant a block away from our apartment, where we would sometimes get a take out pizza; and the White Castle around the corner on Atlantic and Shepherd, where a little square burger cost five cents, or maybe it was six.

Dressing up and getting on a city bus to go and eat at a "fancy" restaurant in Richmond Hill, Queens, was about the most exotic thing that my pre-teen head could wrap itself around. And only barely.

Westfal's was what you might call a "continental" restaurant, around a 30-minute bus ride away. It was at the corner of Atlantic and 111th Street, about a block from the bus stop, which itself was right in front of the Boy's Club. I remember getting off the bus and being impressed by the Club's massive white brick building and wondering about what kinds of things might go on inside. I never did find out.

I'm pretty certain that all of us were at least a little nervous about being inside a place like Westfal's. The menu had nothing on it that I knew, except for maybe a steak or a baked potato. No manicotti, no ziti, no tomato sauce, not a meatball or a sausage or an eggplant in sight.

When it was my turn to order I silently and reluctantly pointed at a strange-sounding item on the intimidating menu. "The duck then," I heard the waiter say. "Very good."

Actually, it wasn't. The meat was so tough and hard to chew that most of it wound up hidden underneath the other stuff that went unfinished on my plate.

I didn't eat duck again until I was almost 30.

And the five of us never stepped foot inside another restaurant together again.

Several years back I got word that an old family friend had passed and that the wake was being held not in Brooklyn but in Richmond Hill. It had been a long while since I'd had a reason to be in this part of Queens. And so you can imagine my surprise when the funeral home turned out to be housed in the exact same space where my parents had taken my brothers and me for our first—and only—restaurant meal together.

Standing outside the funeral home, I reminisced with some old friends about that Sunday afternoon at Westfal's with my parents and brothers.

"What was the occasion?" one wondered matter of factly. "A bus trip all the way out here, wearing your Sunday best no less. Must have been to celebrate something special, right?"

And just like decades earlier, when the fancy restaurant's waiter had pressed me to decide what to order for Sunday supper, I was completely and hopelessly flummoxed, unable to speak a word.

After what felt like a very long period of embarrassing silence, in front of old friends I had not seen in several years, all I could manage to say was, "I have no idea."

Which surprised me as much as it did them.

It still does.

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Veal & mortadella agnolotti



Most of the homemade mortadella we made around the holidays got sliced up (nice and thin!) and eaten as-is. But not all of it.

The stuff makes a fine ingredient for a pasta filling, you know. And this filling is the best to come out of our recent batch of mortadella.

Of course, you don't have to make your own mortadella to put these agnolotti together. Just go out and buy some of the stuff and get to work.

Now.



Melt 3 tablespoons of butter in around a tablespoon of olive oil.



Add 1 pound ground veal.



Once the veal has browned a bit add 1/3 cup or so of either white wine or vermouth and turn up the heat.



Allow the wine to evaporate, then turn off the heat and let the veal cool a bit.



Dice 1/4 pound of mortadella (makes no difference if you use a hunk or slices).



In a food processor add the veal, mortadella, 1/2 cup Parmigiano-Reggiano and one egg, then process until completely blended.



Taste and adjust seasoning as you like. (You could add more cheese, or a little salt, perhaps a dash of nutmeg.)



Instead of using a pastry bag I always put my pasta fillings in a strong plastic bag that can be thrown away after I'm finished. (Of course, you'll need to cut the tip off in order to allow the filling to be squeezed out.)



Roll out your pasta dough on the thin side and around 3 or 4 inches wides.



If your dough is very moist you can skip this step; otherwise brush a little egg wash along the far edge before rolling the dough around the filling.



Use your finger to press down and form the individual agnolotti (I made these on the longish side, but smaller works great too).



This is basically what it will look like once you've worked your way along the entire roll.



All that's left to do now is cut the individual agnolotti.



I boiled and served these in freshly made chicken broth (or brodo) and topped the agnolotti with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and freshly ground black pepper. The reason I chose to go with a classic and simple brodo is so that the veal and mortadella filling can really stand out.

And it did.

Which is a very good thing.