Nourish Paleo Foods

In my pre-paleo days, I could whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookie batter in less than five minutes. I had the recipe memorized. Through years of practice and repetition, I discovered every efficiency of movement and measurement.

What slowed me down was scooping the cookies into neat rows on the tray. That always took a while.

I find the same situation with making meatballs. The making of the meat is speedy but forming the balls takes more time that I like. I’m usually uninterested in the project after the first dozen spheres.

One way around the cookie scooping slowdown was to make the batter into cookie bars. I just dumped the whole batch of dough into a greased 9×12 cake pan. Voila! It was time to pop the pan in the oven.

As I was rolling meatball after meatball for this dish, I pondered if I could have applied the same cookie bar trick to making meatballs. What if instead of rolling each meatball into a neat one-inch sphere, I flattened the meat into a slab on the cutting board and sliced it at one inch intervals in both directions?

I would have meat cubes, instead of meat balls – but would that matter? Once I browned them up, they may even look a little round. Certainly the flavor wouldn’t change. It would definitely be faster — and would be kind of fun. Next time, I am totally trying that.

Meatballs and Tomato Sauce

For the meatballs –

Ground pork  (or, for even more flavor, use pork sausage), 1 pound

Ground beef, 1 pound

Cumin, 2 teaspoons

Paprika, 2 tablespoons

Salt and pepper

For the sauce –

Onion, ½ (about 1 cup chopped)

Garlic, 3-4 cloves

Basil, 1 tablespoon

Paprika, 1 tablespoon

Oregano, ½ tablespoon

Chopped tomatoes, 28-oz can

Water, 1/2 cup

Tomato paste, 2 tablespoons

Salt and pepper

Optional: Sun-dried tomatoes

1. In large bowl, add all ingredients for meatballs. Use your hands to mush together until ingredients are blended well. Form into meatballs about 1 inch in diameter, ending up with about 60 meatballs.
2. Brown meatballs over medium heat in large pan for 5-7 minutes. (You may need to do this in two batches.)  Remove from pan with a slotted spoon, leaving the fat in the pan. Set aside meatballs and cover.
3. Add onions to the fat in the pan. Sauté until soft, about 6 minutes.
4. Add garlic, basil, oregano and paprika. Saute for another minute, stirring frequently.
5. Add canned tomatoes, water and tomato paste.  If you want to add some sun-dried tomatoes, add them now too.  Stir well.
6. Gently spoon meatballs back into the sauce.
7. Let cook over low heat for 45 minutes or so.