Wow Chow Meatballs

These are perhaps the most succulent meatballs you will ever eat.

All the meatball recipes that I have seen bake the balls in the oven. This pretty much destroys the savory goodness of the meatball. Plus, you may as well hand out the nutcrackers when serving the meatballs, they get so hard. My meatballs are boiled in tomato sauce, and turn out soft and savory.

Just like all of my recipes, this one is customizable. I usually hunt around in my refrigerator, looking for leftovers or other savory things to dump into the meat mixture. This time I had some leftover cubanelle peppers and tomato slices. In the past, I’ve added cooked spinach (make sure its FULLY drained if you add it), shredded cheese, or oatmeal. Keep in mind that the more leftovers you add, the more dilute the meat and the spices are, so be sure to add more meat and/or spices accordingly.

Also, this is a big recipe. I was able to make 135 meatballs with these ingredients. The great thing is that meatballs freeze very well. Even though this recipe has raw eggs, the uncooked meatballs can be frozen for up to 4 months. So, next time you want to have a spaghetti dinner, just pop the meatballs into a can of tomatoes, cook for an hour and there’s your dinner.

OK, on with the show.

Wow Chow Meatballs

4 lbs ground beef
2 lbs ground bulk sausage
1 cup breadcrumbs
4 eggs
2 tablespoons dried basil
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 cup diced white onion
small saucepan with 1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons Caesar or Italian salad dressing
2 28oz cans petite diced tomatoes
salt and pepper to taste
grated Parmesan cheese (optional)
1/2 cup to 1 cup leftover veggies or etc (optional)

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Why Local Food is More Expensive

I found this terrific post at Food Renegade (a terrific food blog!). I’ve often wondered why foods produced locally are so much more expensive than transported food, even food coming from Mexico, China, and California. I figured it had a lot to do with CAFOs and how they are protected by Big Government. And I see that I am correct. But not only does the government pander to Big Farm Corporations, but it punishes the small farmer. Food Renegade had a guest post by farmer Joel Salatin, a self-described “Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, lunatic farmer” wjo has been featured in Omnivore’s Dilemma, Acres USA, and Mother Earth News, among other media.

Many local and real food advocates chafe under commonly higher prices, not realizing that in fact, much of this higher price does not end up in the farmer’s pocket. It is rather siphoned off as regulatory expense to comply with asinine government regulations that either do not scale down to smaller producers, or are outright capricious and inapplicable.

Last year, here at Polyface we entered the mandatory Workman’s Compensation (WC) world when we passed our third employee. This is a state mandated program administered by a private company. I’m not sure about all the arrangements, but there’s virtually no competition. After our insurance agent filled out all the paperwork he could, he set up a three-way phone interview so I could finish the loose ends. “Only 15 minutes,” he assured me. It took an hour and the questions were outrageous when applied to us.

Our interns and apprentices, who receive free room and board plus a modest stipend in return for their education, had to be treated like employees. On our farm, we integrate cattle, pigs, and poultry to such an extent that these different types of animals are in the same area and everyone handles chores for all of them. But in WC land, employees must be segregated between “Beef and Pork” or “Poultry.” They can’t mix. The risk actuarials are different so they must be separately categorized.

The real kicker was a delivery driver who takes frozen meat and eggs to the restaurants and home customers. Since we’re a farm, we can’t have such a delivery driver. The only delivery driver we can have is a live animal hauler–highest risk in the book. If we were a delivery service, we could have a low-risk delivery driver, but that’s impossible with a farm. Farms don’t have those kinds of employees.

Bottom line: our little farm operation is paying more than $10,000 a year for government-mandated Workman’s Comp using an assessment system written for Tyson and Cargill. It’s absurd. And immoral. Guess who pays that huge cost? The customer. In a thousand different ways, this scenario plays out across the local food movement, arbitrarily and capriciously prejudicing the price. And that, dear friends, is the main reason why local food is more expensive.

One of my favorite bloggers runs a dairy farm in Montgomery County, NY: Northview Diary. It’s a beautiful and personal journey into the life of the rural Upstate NY farmer, loving the farm life but struggling– often with tears of frustration– about the burdensome government regulations and problems with bureaucrats. Our farmers deserve much better.

We are seeing Big Government take over the food supply. This is frightening to me, knowing full well how Big Government blunders and butchers its way through people’s lives. It is high, high time to grow, buy, and sell locally– to grow one’s own food as much as possible and to support the local farmers as much as possible.

In Defense of Hummus

Hummus is a dip, made from chickpeas (also known as garbanzo beans) and spices. As a kid, I HATED chickpeas. My mom put them in salads, in pasta fazool, in chicken soup– YUCK! I used to pick them out, they were just so awful.

My, my, how I have changed. I love chickpeas! I crave them! They are magnificent little balls of golden nutrition and delight! I feel like superwoman after eating them.

Go figure.

I usually buy the canned chickpeas, to sprinkle in my salads or eat with stews or soups. Sometimes I will dump a cupful into a small bowl, crumble feta cheese on them, add a little Ken’s Caesar Lite salad dressing, and gobble it up. Wow. I feel like I could leap tall buildings in a single bound after that!

When I spotted prepared, packaged hummus at my local supermarket yesterday, I grabbed some. Hummus is something else– you either love it or you hate it. Of course, I loved it. I loved it better than any bacon sour cream dip, than anything I’ve eaten in a while. And it was so perfect watching the movie “Lawrence of Arabia” with the kids, snacking on hummus and flat bread and olives. Yum!

OK, enough gushing. Here’s the nitty-gritty on hummus.

It’s SO GOOD FOR YOU! Really, dump that sour cream dip trash. Never look it in the eye again. I’d like to introduce you to hummus.

Here are the ingredients on the container of Cedar’s brand Roasted Red Pepper Hommus:

• Fresh steamed chickpeas
• roasted bell peppers
• red pepper strips
• sesame tahini
• water
• sunflower oil
• olive oil
• citric acid
• gum arabic
• garlic and spices
• 1/10 of 1% sodium benzoate
• potassium sorbate as a preservative

Calories: 50 per 2 tablespoons
Fat in Calories: 25
Carbs: 5g
Protein: 2g
Vitamin A: 32%
Iron: 2%

It contains no wheat gluten, no sugar, no salt. You can see it’s nutritious. The kids wrinkled their noses at it (they prefer salsa with their chips), but I was happy with my hummus and flat bread. I tried a few tortilla corn chips with it, and it was OK, but not great. The hummus was superb with a few small rolls of flat bread, and olives. Really, really good. So if you haven’t tried the hummus yet, I recommend it! I bought two containers, the Roasted Red Pepper and the Artichoke Spinach; the Red Pepper was much better.

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