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Italy - Spaghetti and Meatballs
Spaghetti and meatballs with a homemade sauce.
Ingredients:
Meatballs:
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
3 slices bread, crumbled
2 pounds lean ground beef
1/2 cup finely chopped onion
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1 clove garlic, smashed, minced
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
.
Sauce:
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, smashed and minced
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon dried leaf oregano
1/2 teaspoon dried leaf basil
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 large can (28 to 36 ounces total) crushed Italian tomatoes
2 cans (6 ounces each) tomato paste
16 ounces thin spaghetti
Parmesan cheese
Preparation:
Recipe for spaghetti and meatballs
Make meatballs. In a medium bowl, beat eggs lightly; add milk and bread and let stand for about 5 minutes. Add ground beef, onion, parsley, garlic, salt, and pepper; mix gently until well blended. Shape into about 24 meatballs, about 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Place meatballs in a generously greased large shallow baking pan. Bake meatballs at 450° for 25 minutes.
In a Dutch oven, in hot oil over medium heat, sauté onion until tender and just begins to turn golden. Add remaining sauce ingredients; bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 30 minutes. Taste and adjust seasoning, adding more salt, if necessary. Add meatballs; cover and simmer 50 to 60 minutes longer, stirring from time to time.
Cook spaghetti according to package directions; drain.
Serve spaghetti topped with meatballs in sauce; sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese.
Spaghetti and meatballs serves 6.
And the five minutes are up! Glancing back down at her still disgusting looking mixture, she reached over and almost knocked over the milk carton while taking the spices. Sprinkling them onto the mixture, she groaned as she saw that she was going to have to touch the ground beef - a fact that had alluded her when she had started working on this catastrophe.
Quickly casting a cleaning charm on her hands, she took a breath and then put her hand into the beef mash thing and popped it into the mixture, her face all scrunched up in disgust.
"Yuck - that looks absolutely horrible," she commented to herself as she gazed down at the contents of her bowl. It was a good thing she hadn't eaten before class... All this cooking and beef and icky mixtures would have definitely caused her to be sick.
Taking a wooden spoon thingy that looked like it could do the mixing job well, she wiped her hands with a piece of parchment since she hadn't located any other means and began mixing the contents of the wooden bowl, surprised by how hard it was. She felt her arm muscles working as she mixed and mixed - but the mixture didn't really seem to look any less gross.
The fifth year groaned again as she saw that she was going to have to touch the mixture now - yes, it did look a little less icky now that it was all just one great lump of beef, but it was still BEEF! Scrunching up her nose, Rachel plunged her hands into the beef and took her first helping. She pretended it was wet sand - even though wet sand was usually a lot grainier, but it was the best she could come up with - and slowly formed the meat balls.
Looking at the balls at the end, she saw that she had made almost forty meatballs when the instructions said only 24. Ahh... 1 and a half inches in diameter... Hers were a tad small. Sighing, she added couples of meatballs together and generally played around with the amounts until she had 25 of them, and all fairly similar sized. Eh, good enough.
Ew, grease!! This class was gross - and she HATED cooking. Grabbing one of the baking pans, Rachel
overgreased it, for she had learned from the butter experience, and swiftly popped all 25 balls of meat onto the tray. Walking over to where there was a selection of ovens for them, she put her baking pan in and set the temperature to 450 degrees -just as the instructions say- and turned to face the clock once more to count the 25 minutes she was supposed to wait. In the meantime, she cast another cleaning charm on her hands, then used a parchment to scrub her wand as well as she could.