my tokyo kitchen

I haven’t made anything exciting of my own recently, but seeing as I decided to launch a blog without any dedicated content on the back burner, I would like to share a recipe from one of my favorite cooking blogs.

Today, I made the surprisingly simple Everyday Meatballs recipe from the amazing Smitten Kitchen—insofar as I ever follow a recipe, mind you—and they were as mouth-watering and amazing as they look on screen. From the first bite, I knew this would become a staple of my recipe stable.

By the way, did you know that spaghetti and meatballs aren’t really a thing in Italy? I mean, they have meatballs—and they obviously have spaghetti—but putting the two together is more of an Italian ~ American thing…which yours truly just so happens to be!

You wouldn’t know from looking at me, but I grew up in a house with a German ~ American mother and a Japanese dad. My biological whosiwhatsit (she says whilst making a dismissive hand gesture), pissed off shortly after giving me only his name and his nose. However, I did actually benefit from him being a second-generation Italian immigrant when I was a wee little Scout, and I would visit the only member of that side of the family who genuinely adored me: my dear, departed grandfather.

Actually, come to think of it, it was three different grandfathers who were the sweetest and kindest to me of all my family members, but I was too young and too autistically in-my-own-head to recognize that while they were still alive…a sadness I have to live with now that I’m old enough to understand. Wait…isn’t this a food blog?

Anyway, no matter the day of the week we would visit, Grampa Wes would always treat me to his gorgeous Sunday Gravy—or spaghetti sauce as I knew it—but if I wanted meatballs, those were usually found as leftovers in his fridge (next to the salami that was wrapped in brown butcher’s paper) and heated up just for me…or occasionally eaten on a sloppy, saucy sandwich.

All grown up now, I remain a huge fan of meatballs of any stripe, and I’d probably eat them a lot more often if I wasn’t an even bigger fan of not ever cooking them at home. Maybe it’s just me, but I can neither fry nor bake nor reheat the round little fuckers without the whole (teeny) house and all of my (not so teeny) clothes smelling of cooked fat. Which really, really grosses me out.

Imagine my delight to discover this Smitten Kitchen recipe, where the meatballs are simmered in a simple sauce, resulting in a tender, delicious dish…without having to open every window in the apartment mid-winter.

I followed the recipe as best I could, despite a missing ingredient or two—which can alllmost always be subbed for something else* if you act like you know what you’re doing—as well as adding my personal required special, secret ingredients that I always put into spaghetti sauce.** And also throwing in some extra red pepper flakes and freshly ground black pepper to make more of an Arrabbiata sauce. Okay, maybe I didn’t follow the recipe as much as I could have.

Seriously tho, I used to constantly emphasize to my students two important things: always read a recipe all the way through before you start cooking; and do your best to keep to a recipe the first time you make it, tweaking only after you have a feeling for how something is made. And while I know this is the best advice in my heart of hearts, I always find myself deviating, either out of necessity or ADHD.

I’ll tell you the truth: this method does not always work out for me, but those are the times I simply don’t photograph or post what I made that day. Lucky for me, everything turned out well, even after adding the meatballs once the tomato sauce had cooked down the appropriate amount, and then resolving to really really follow the recipe’s instructions not to lift the lid of the pot for at least twenty~ish minutes…only to have the stove…turn. itself. off. at the five-minute mark!?!

Yep.

Anyone who hasn’t cooked on a ridiculously small Japanese stove may not know that, aside from being ridiculously small, Japanese stoves are specially designed by scientists to turn themselves off at the exact moment you need them to stay on. There is a little button you can press if you want to deep fry doughnuts for Hanukkah or, say, simmer meatballs in tomato sauce for twenty~ish minutes, but the stove can (and will) often override its own override button, beep annoyingly enough to be heard through noise-canceling headphones, and then turn. itself. off. gawddammit.

Even more luckily, if you are able to hear the beep beeeep beeeeep through both your noise-canceling headphones and the Hedwig & the Angry Inch soundtrack, you can do the burner dance, wherein you move the pot from hob to hob each time the gas goes off. Only then can you ladle those delectable, giant, saucy meatballs onto your soy noodles (Sorry! I was being lazy today!), grate an amount of parmesan over the top which could best be described as unreasonable, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

And you know what? Enjoy them I did! Even the implacable Mr. Scout had seconds! And you know what else? I managed to save a few meatballs to turn into a sandwich tomorrow…just like my Grampa used to make me.

*In this case, the meat I used was Japan’s curiously standard beef~pork mixture, which is similar to what is often called “meatloaf mix” in the United States; the fresh parsley was exchanged for half as much of the dried herb, because my fresh stuff was…squidgy; and I was too lazy to squoosh (& clean up from squooshing) garlic cloves, so I used nin’niku from the tube.

**Worcestershire sauce and honey…shhh!