Guus Bosman

This week I made Italian meat balls. This was great fun to do and very rewarding. As far as I can remember this was the first time ever that I made these.

I used turkey meat because it's lean and delicious. I prepared the meat balls on Sunday evening with garlic, finely cut onions, Worcester sauce, an egg, breadcrumbs, salt, pepper & chopped up parsley. I used a recipe from a recipe book. The meat balls stayed in the fridge for 24 hours and I baked them in olive oil for a couple of minutes Monday evening.

I had also made a fresh marinara sauce with garlic, a little bit of onion, basil, thyme and peeled tomatoes and I cooked the meat balls in the sauce for 15 minutes.

My usual cooking style is 'experimental': try it out and see what tastes nice. However, using these recipes is great fun too. It really helps to have a guideline in what makes a great dish, and Monday's dinner turned out great.

Today we had the second portion of the meat balls. As an experiment I cooked tonight's tomato sauce with a different canned tomato: Cento tomatoes imported from Italy ($1,99 per can). The sauce was nice again, but not significantly better than the sauce made from Whole Food's tomatoes on Monday.

There is actually an even more expensive tomato type, San Marzano, which is supposed to be even more delicious and sells for $3,49 per can. That may be nice to try a next time too. One thing I learned is that there shouldn't be too much marinara sauce over the pasta; next time I'll use only half a can for sauce for the 2 of us. Of course there is no need to always use the very best tomatoes, but I'm curious to see if what the taste difference between regular and expensive canned tomatoes. The next step of course is to use fresh tomatoes to make a marinara sauce.

Cento Italian peeled tomatoes.