a meal making matt

Old World Spagetti and Meat Balls

2011-09-02T20:49:00.000-07:00

First of all I'll have to apologize for this post, I didn't have my camera handy during the making process of this dish, but hopefully I'll be able to come back with some of those.

So this is a recipe that has been passed down for generations in my family with each person making their own little change here and there, but the memories this dish brings back are just astounding. This is a more savory sause rather than sweet which is the way I like it. Hope you enjoy.

Ingredients:

9 cloves garlic

1 good sized yellow onion

1 lb 85/15 ground beef

1 large egg (more if necessary to keep beef together)

1 8 oz can tomato paste

2 15 oz cans tomato sause (no added seasonings)

2 T extra virgin olive oil

2 T butter

1 1/2 T dried basil, oregano, parsley, italian seasoning

2 bay leaves

dash salt and pepper

2 T parmesan cheese

Sause:

In a large stock pot, throw in 3/4 of the onion diced small and 6 cloves of garlic minced. Add a drizzle of olive oil. Add a sprinkle of salt and saute until the onions are nice and translucent. Add 3/4 of the tomato paste and mix in with the garlic briefly. Then add the two cans of tomato sause followed by one of the tomato sause cans worth of water. Stir to combine. Add the bay leaf, basil, oregano, and parsley. Stir everything in and then cover and bring to a very low simmer. Simmer, stirring occasionally for 1.5 hours. In the mean time make the meat balls. After the 1.5 hours have expired and the meat balls are ready add them gently to the sause and submerge in the sause. Don't stir the sause for an hour. After that go ahead and stir and allow to finish simmering. The longer the sause simmers the better. And this is one sause that gets better as a left over as well. Enjoy.

Meat Balls:

In a bowl combine the ground beef, italian seasoning, egg, cheese, remaining garlic minced and remaining 1/4 of diced onion. combine into beef well and form into the size ball that you desire. About fifteen minutes before the first 1.5 hours is over drizzle in a touch of olive oil into a skillet and add the butter. Over a medium heat melt the butter and add the meat balls. You only want to brown each side not cook the meat balls all the way through. When both sides are browned, gently remove from the skillet and add to the sause. Submerge the meat balls into the sause and allow the meat balls to finish cooking in the sause. After about an hour it is ok to start gently stirring the sause until it is done.

Plating:

Serve over some al-dente pasta of your choice. I usually do two meat balls per plate with a healthy amount of sause topped with some fresh grated parmesan cheese and a nice hunk of crusty bread. I really hope you guys enjoy this dish!

Herb Cheese Stuffed Turkey and Beef Meat Loaf

2009-11-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

Description:

This is basically a new take on a simple old idea of a meat loaf. My problem with traditional meat loaf is that they are typically dry and tasteless. So i wanted to take a new twist on this old idea. I used turkey because it has good flavor and also is a bit more on the healthy side. Turkey can be kinda dry so I mixed in some less lean beef as well. Also with the cheese stuffing you can really add anything you want here, this was just my first take. Give this meat loaf a shot and tell me what you think of it.

Ingredients:

Ground turkey 85/15 1 lb

Ground beef 80/20 1 lb

Olive oil 3 - 4 T

Large eggs 2

Cumin

Great Scott Seasoning

Squirt ketchup

Squirt mustard

Cream cheese 1/2 packet

Alouett garlic and herb cheese 1 tub

Directions:

Start by preheating the oven to 375 F. In a bowl mix one full tub of the flavored Alouett chess with one half packet of the cream cheese. Mix this throughly. In another bowl, add the beef and turkey with two eggs, and all spices to flavor. Again mix very throughly. On a pan pour the oil and with you hand coat the bottom of the pan. Place about half or three fourths of the mean in the pan. Create the log and also place a long channel in the center. Now spoon in the cheese. Take the remaining meat and place it on top and try to seal it as well as possible. Place in the oven for 45 to 55 minutes or until internal temperature of 170ish is reached.

The cheese will probably burst out the side. Try to stuff it back in but what you can't spoon over the top. Then turn on the oven to Broil, and broil until top is gently golden brown.

Remove from oven allow to sit for a few minutes, cut and serve.

Roasted Garlic Chicken Panini

2009-11-06T08:31:00.000-08:00

Ingredients:

6 Chicken Thighs

2 T butter

Salt (to taste)

Peper (to taste)

1 Head Garlic

Olive Oil

Cheese of choice

Tomato

Green Leaf Lettuce

Description:

This is a fairly simple roasted garlic chicken panini sandwich perfect for making a weeks worth of filling and tasty lunches or after work snacks. The garlic is sweet and delicious, the chicken moist and scrumptious. With the addition of fresh tomato and lettuce it has light and springy notes too. Perfection.

Preparation:

Start with the chicken. I took a casserole pan buttered it and placed the chick thighs lightly seasoned with salt and pepper and a small dollop of butter on top. You can use any cut of chicken you want, but I find that thighs have the most meat for the price and they are always moist it seems too. Place this in a ban marie for ensured moistness and place in the oven to roast on a low temperature until an internal temp of 180 degrees Fahrenheit is reached. Personally I used a temperature of 290 degrees Fahrenheit and it took about two to two and a half hours.

Mean while take a whole medium sized head of garlic and peal each and every delicious clove. Take some foil and place the cloves inside with some olive oil making sure that each clove is liberally coated with the oil. Now close the packet like a little pillow and place into the oven along with the chicken. Check periodically on the cloves, they should be lightly brown and tender, and not at all crunchy when they're ready. Generally this takes about 30 minutes to an hour.

When the chicken is done peal off the skin and set aside for a cooks treat for alter. Pull off the meat from the bones and lightly shred in a bowl with a couple of forks. Take the roasted garlic and place it in the bowl with the chicken. Use your hand and mash up the garlic coating the chicken all over with the roasted garlic.

Now you're ready to assemble the sandwiches. Take how ever much chicken you want, add some cheese. Now place in your panini press or on a skillet to toast and melt the cheese inside. When you have a golden brown outside on the sandwich remove and place a slice of tomato and lettuce reassemble cut on the diagonal, and serve.

For me this recipe made seven sandwiches. One gloriously garlicy moist chickeny sandwich for lunch or a snack for each day. This particle sandwich works great cold or warm by the way and also as a side note, it pairs pretty well with the acorn squash soup below. Enjoy! :-)

Yummy Rosted Acorn Squash Soup for the Fall

2009-10-26T11:54:00.000-07:00

Ingredients:

3 good sized acorn squash

8 T butter.

2 good sized leeks

4 c. chicken broth

Milk, cream or half and half

2 Baking potatoes

Nutmeg

Rosemary

Sour Cream or Cream fresh

Description:

This is a soup that I came up with out of a desire to have a nice warm comforting fall soup. It certainly has fulfilled that role quite well. It is based off a soup that my boyfriend is quite fond of, and perhaps I'll post about that soup later on.

Anyway this soup is a deliciously golden yellow soup, rich and loquaciously creamy in texture. A mouthful brings you to memories of autumns spent in the pumpkin patch or walking through a colorfully leaf strewn lane. So give it a try.

Procedure:

I started off by splitting and deseeding the squash. Fill the cavity with some butter, about 1T each half and oven roast for a little over an hour or until mostly soft. Mean while cube up the potatoes. You can peal the skin off if you wish, but out of a combination of laziness and like of the rustic flavor and visual aspect, I leave it on. When the squash is done go a head and scoop out the tender golden flesh of the squash into the same bowl as the cubed up potatoes.

Now in your pot, put a few tea spoons of butter and place the chopped up leeks in there to and begin to sauté them. Keep at it until the leeks are nice and soft then add in the chicken broth along with the squash and potatoes. Bring everything to a boil. You want to boil everything until the potatoes are nice and soft. While you're waiting for everything to boil, it is a good time to add the nutmeg and rosemary to your flavor preference.

When everything is done boiling, remove the soup from the heat and pour into the blender. Place the blender on liquify or some similar setting. It may have a bit of trouble mixing since there are a lot of solids in there. This is the point to add the milk. Add as much as it takes to get everything blending smoothly and to your personal preference.

Now just place in a bowl with a dollop of sour cream if you desire or not if you prefer it that way. This soup can be served cold or hot, though I tend to prefer it warm myself.

Camping Fare

2009-10-20T17:18:00.000-07:00

We decided to go camping this weekend. It was an awesome time, a huge bon fire beautiful stars in the sky above us and awesome company if somewhat cold, and by cold I mean freezing. When I say freezing I mean literally. Still it was an awesome time and I'm glad that we got to go camping at last. I've been looking forward to it all year and certainly the last couple of months or so.

Of course we brought some food with us to cook for the evening meal and also breakfast the next morning. I'll go ahead an apologize now for being a dummy and forgetting that I had my camera with me as we cooked our dinner, so my descriptive phrase will have to suffice, but I did finally remember it as we were cooking breakfast.

So to start we just made some simple chicken fajitas. Once we got a fire going good and hot, which was something of a challenge due to the fire wood being wet after all the rain here, we got the skillet on there and warming. I chopped up some nice red bell peppers and cut some boneless chicken breast into thinnish strips and did a split right down the middle half the skillet devoted to chicken and the other half devoted to the peppers. We kept everything "au natural" where the spices were concerned, after all this is camping food and not five star fare, right? :-)

It took a fair amount of time for everything to get cooked, especially the peppers, and the fire did eat one slice of chicken due to my unsteady hand. When all was said and done though we took some tortillas piled on some chicken then some peppers and some shredded cheese, sour cream and salsa all to taste before chowing down. I know what you're thinking, salsa and other condiments? Well I know this is camping fare and supposed to be simple, but we're not in the dark ages either you know. It was yummy since we were both hungry and basically had not eaten all day. Such days seem to make food taste even better.

So the next morning we had to get the fire starting again. We had sausage and eggs. There was some brief debate about sunny side up eggs which we both love or scrambled eggs. In the end we decided to go with scrabbled, which if you ever go camping I'd highly recommend since after this experience sunny side up would have never worked. Anyway it was the same basic setup only we cooked the eggs in a cast iron skillet instead of on the cast iron griddle. You can see our setup in the first picture.

Again it took everything a while to finish cooking, but the eggs were nice and moist still and with the addition of some melted cheese on top were great especially on such a cold morning. The sausage too was nice and crispy and delicious. Both meals had that indescribable yummy flavor of smoke from the camp fire and were thoroughly enjoyed. The second pic is our plate loaded up with plenty of cheesy eggs and crispy sausage. A simple but tasty meal. So next time you find yourself going camping, don't forget to bring along the food and someone special to enjoy it with.

a meal making matt

2009-10-13T18:16:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone. I'm Matt of a meal making matt. Here you will find blogs about the meals that I make with the included recipes and photos of the final product. Some of the meals are those that I've just cooked for years and others will be creations out of my own mind. Generally between work during the week and a social life on the weekends I tend to cook one or two large meals per week so that I can have left overs for lunch at work. So you can expect to have updates from me about once a week or so.

I'm also thinking that if i happen to get some food from somewhere when I'm feeling kinda lazy and get some good take out or something of the sort I'll post about it here for you to read an salivate about in much the same way I did when I got it.

Anyway I just wanted to get a first post out there in the world for people to read and such. Check back soon for my first real foodie post. :-)