Why hello there, and damn if that isn’t a title, huh? My need for contextualization grows with every day. Welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where your author is slowing folding in on himself like a fractal ouroboros devouring himself. I’m Jon O’Guin, and I wanna thank everyone for sticking with us despite our no-show last week. I’ll explain what happened in a second, but of course, for our hungry, hasty readers, you can click this link to jump straight to the recipe. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Made a Right Meaty Mess of Myself

As noted, sorry for missing the post last week: I had every intent to have it up on Wednesday, but Tuesday night I jacked up my neck, and had a minor compulsive episode, picking up a “new book”, and reading to finish it. I often go a little too ham on novels I pick up: I famously read the 4th Harry Potter book in only 4 hours as a teen, and regularly do not put down a fiction book I’ve picked up until I’ve finished it or I have to go to sleep. This practice ran straight into a wall last week, as it turns out the “book” I was reading (actually volume 5 of the web-series The Wandering Inn) had a word count of over 1,000,000 words. Specifically, it is 1,098,203. For comparison, Books 1 through 7 of Harry Potter, combined, have a word count of 1,084,179. So I essentially sat down Tuesday night, and read EVERY HARRY POTTER BOOK over the next two days.

Binge-reading is a little understood part of the reading disorder pantheon.

As you might guess, that really ate up my time and attention for the week. I’m sorry I let it get out of hand, and I’ve forced myself to be much more measured as I start volume 6. Then my evenings for the next couple days were full of handling all the stuff I SHOULD have been doing while I was reading: laundry, groceries, taking out the trash, doing the dishes, etc etc.

Speaking of, today’s recipe is the first (and potentially only) one I cooked on this trip to Leavenworth, and it continues the unexpected mini-arc of this Molly May being, so far, meatless. I assure you all that was entirely unintentional…though I do have two more meatless recipes, so I could fill out the month with it…we’ll see. I just wanted to bring it up to highlight that If you’re languishing without new meat recipes from moi, I assure you, I have a couple stored up, and will be doing some more in the future. I just didn’t today because…well, honestly, because I needed some variety.

One of the downsides of working/living in Leavenworth is that the city is a cured meat mecca, with brats/chorizo/sausage around every corner. There are 3 restaurants within 100 feet of where I work, and at least a dozen more within 500. So it’s very common for me to load up with meats at lunch time, leading to a chiller dinner. I’ve been working my way through some boxed pasta mixes, had a can of soup on a couple cooler evenings, ONE time I whipped up some fried rice, but I wanted to refine that recipe before presenting it. So it’s pretty common for my dinners to just be meat-free over here. (Not that this is a universal thing: I’ve also had plenty of Costco frozen cheesesteak sandwiches, or air-fried chicken strips.)

Or had burgers a couple times.

So when I needed another Molly Yeh recipe to bounce to after Baz’s potatoes, I seized on this one. Partly because it felt like a fun mix of both complicated and easy, and because it let me play around with a new kitchen toy, AND, time willing, because it served as a tie-in to a potential second post this week about the aforementioned boxed pastas.  So, that’s enough of why, let’s talk about what and how.

Mashing the Nut Button

That line reads weird if you don’t know about the meme, so let me quickly see about dropping that link.

Huh. Didn’t really make things better. Look, the point is that this is a meat-ball recipe with no meat, instead substituting toasted nuts and shredded cheese. Why? Nutrition and texture, you silly-billy. See, nuts are a very strong source of protein with a large amount of fat. When broken up and softened, they can imitate the craggly edges of well-browned meat. Cheese adds additional fat, softness, and more protein. It’s not a perfect process, but just like well-worked wheat gluten can mimic chicken, well-processed nuts can mimic beef.

And that’s the fundamental basis of this recipe: it’s a “meat-ball” recipe that’s mostly nuts, cheese, and bread. In her cookbook, Molly explains that it’s a recipe from her ex-boyfriend’s mom, and was the only ‘faux meat’ product said ex-boyfriend would eat. Molly goes on to sell the dish as ‘so good, you could imagine meatballs are a knock-off of IT, not the other way around.’ And that her memory of them was strong enough that, sometime after their break-up, she directly asked him via FB for the recipe. And thus she gained the recipe to give to us.

And at its core, it’s a recipe of three steps: make the mix, form the balls, and cook. First up, you gotta toast some nuts.

Sad robot voice: “Nut”. “Nut”. “nutnutnutnutnut”

Also, you’re going to want to be sure you have a reasonably sized food processor (or blender) for this mix, which is going to be around 2-3 cups. I made it work in a 2 cup Ninja, but a bigger tool would have made it much easier. Once the nuts are toasted, you goss them into the processor with some garlic, and pulse to a loose crumb. To that mixture, you add almost every other ingredient: dried parsley, salt and pepper, parmesan cheese, and breadcrumbs.

In classic Jon fashion, I only took pictures of the expensive parts.

A couple pulses to combine, and then you work in 2 eggs. Here’s where things get fussy: like I said, a bigger processor is better, because you want to go “until the mixture forms a ball”. Which, in a smaller one, it doesn’t have space to do, but it formed rounded edges, so I called that good. From there, work it into 1.5 tbsp balls. The directions are to “pack just firmly enough so they hold together, but not too firmly, otherwise they’ll be tough”. Which…isn’t a lot to go on. I think I squeezed mine too firmly. Then, you cook them. The exact method is up to you: Molly suggest pan frying them over medum-high until browned on all sides, or deep-frying them, which gave ME the idea to air-fry them.

Very original idea, do not steal. “What if fry different way?”

In sending me off to Leavenworth, my mother, not known what appliances I would have access to besides a stove, sent me off with a $200 counter-top device from Costco that can bake, broil, toast, air-fry, and more. I have predominantly used it to cook single-serving meals so the oven doesn’t heat up the whole apartment, and the occasional air-fry. (A great way to heat/re-heat the aforementioned chicken strips.)

Once browned on both sides (mine took some light spritzes with cooking spray, 6 minutes of cooking with a turn half-way through) you have nicely browned balls. One of which I immediately tore open.

By “immediately”, I of course mean “once it had cooled down to touch.”

And I want to highlight that this cross section of the “meat”ball really speaks to my experience with the dish: that right there is very clearly not meat. Or at least, not GOOD meat. But it doesn’t look bad, either. And that’s my assessment of this recipe: when eating these meatballs (Which, again, I may have packed too tightly, making too tough), you will not think you are eating well-made meatballs. But the flavor in them is so intensely Italian (garlic, parsley, parmesan), that you may, from moment to moment, convince yourself that these are some kind of cheap Wal-Mart processed meat. And even when you don’t, even when you know they’re not meat: it doesn’t really matter.

I tossed mine into a pan of bubbling marinara, and ate them two ways, a couple weeks apart: first on top of spaghetti, sprinkled with extra parm.

This is actually just “the extra cheese from grating the cup I needed”.

And that process was fine, even if the firmness of the balls was all the more obvious when trying to stab them and twirl up some spaghetti. But then, I thought “I’ll let these sit in the sauce, in the fridge, for a week or two, so they soften up, and make like, a Meat-ball sub out of them.”

Maximum “vaguely macho Philly” vibes.

 And that…Well, it worked surprising less than I thought. Not the sub itself: the dish was perfectly fine. Honestly, it worked better as a quick lunch that I thought it was going to: When you got like, ¼” wide strips of sauce-soaked ball, THAT could be passed off as meat, no question. But the sauce had penetrated surprisingly little into the ball. But even then, again, I wasn’t too bummed out by it. IT was like the mid-point between a falafel and a meat-ball, and in my opinion, it worked. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t super meat-like, because it was flavorful, and it had a mostly good texture. It worked as a dish, even if it didn’t work 100% as “meat”. So I definitely recommend giving it a try, especially given that making the balls themselves are only like, 15 minutes of work, if you grate your cheese while toasting your nuts.

THIS WEEK? – A BREAK DOWN OF A BOXED PASTA PRODUCT, IF I HAVE TIME

NEXT WEEK: LET’S STICK THE LANDING WITH ANOTHER WEEK OF MEATLESS DISHES, SERVING UP SOME PASTA AND SPROUTS.

Recipe

Molly Yeh’s Ex’s Mom’s Meat(less)balls

Ingredients

1 cup walnuts or almonds, toasted

2 cloves garlic

1 cup Parmesan cheese

1 cup panko

2 tbsp dried parsley

¼ tsp kosher salt

Fresh Black Pepper to taste

2 eggs

Oil

Preparation

1. Toss the walnuts and garlic into a food processor, and process to a loose crumb. Add remaining ingredients except for eggs, and process until combined. Add the eggs, and run until mixture forms a ball.

2. Roll into 1.5 tbsp balls, trying not to over-compress. Spritz with oil and air-fry at 375 for 6 minutes, turning once, or pan-fry over medium-high.

3. Add to red sauce, and treat as you would a normal meatball for Italian culinary applications.