This quick preparation is adapted from Nancy Silverton’s, Mozza cookbook. I used as the foundation for the braising sauce for the meatballs you see here. Silverton calls it a passata di pomodoro, referring to ripe fresh tomatoes at the end of summer harvest in Italy, that are “passed” through a food mill to separate the skin and  seeds from the pulp that will used in countless recipes. Mozza’s version starts with already canned tomatoes. This is not a finished sauce, by any means, but more of a basic tomato building block , you could turn into a more complex sauce by adding garlic, onion, herbs, other aromatics, meats, etc.  In my slightly quicker version, you can bypass the food mill and use a blender to coarsely puree the already peeled canned tomatoes. In about 35 minutes from prep to finish you are left with a wonderful basic tomato sauce to launch a more complex dish.

Basic Tomato Sauce
adapted from Mozza, by Nancy Silverton

Meatballs are the new cupcake. Restaurants devoted entirely to the sphere have sprouted in NYC and in every major city, and high-profile, upscale restaurants have put them on the menu. I can hear guys from Long Island to the Jersey shore saying “Fuggedaboutit! Friggin’ meatballs, I can get at every pizza joint in the tri-state area, so what’s the biggie?”

Ah…but there are meatballs—rubbery, dense, flavorless, smothered in industrial sauce, more breadcrumbs than meat, food service frozen, mystery meat containing, greasy and grisly—and then there are MEATBALLS (angel’s chorus!!) like this one.

I too, was skeptical when I spied this recipe in Mozza, a sometimes daunting cookbook by Nancy Silverton, Chef/Owner of the restaurant in Los Angeles that the book is named for.  I say daunting because Silverton is a perfectionist and her recipes do not cut corners, or cut you slack when it comes to the quality of ingredients or techniques needed to achieve her delicious and authentic results. This recipe looked deceptively simple, but the resulting meatball is etherial.  I’ll admit I cursed a few of the steps and made a mental note that dredging the meatballs in flour and pan browning them, before braising them in homemade (!) tomato sauce might be skippable.  Why not just bake the darn balls on a sheet pan, all at once, and save the calories from flour and the fat from frying them? The answer assaults your senses when you taste one. BECAUSE THOSE DETAILS MAKE A DIFFERENCE! They were perfect.

I ate 5 of them just standing around taking pictures and I won’t say how many later when I served them to my husband and daughter for dinner that evening. Without pasta, by the way, or a big doughy roll wrapped around them either. These meatballs are no side dish. They beg to be the center of the meal. I served them with shaved Parmesan, a slice of buttered semolina toast (just like they do at Mozza) and a fantastic Caponata, also from Mozza, which you will have to wait until another time to hear about.

Warning: the recipe asks you to provide a quart of homemade Passata di Pomodoro, a basic tomato sauce that is a Silverton staple used throughout the book. Since I didn’t heed the advice I always give my students to read through entire recipes before you start to cook, I was surprised by this little detail when I got to it. When I scrambled to make the sauce, I was surprised again by how simple and delicious it turned out, in under 30 minutes, and worth the small delay. I recommend making an enormous batch of this sauce and freezing it in 1/2 quart containers so you’ll always have some on hand.

I often dream of opening a small restaurant with a menu of fresh, house made comfort foods, the kind of foods that everyone loves whether times are good, bad, happy or sad. Food that brings people together over common ground, (I mean who doesn’t like a meatball?)  Good solid food without cutting any corners on quality and technique. I know I’d have a version of these meatballs on the menu. Put them on yours and enjoy!

 My Oh My Meatballs
adapted from Mozza, by Nancy Silverton

(To get these super cool temporary tattoos I designed, go to my new Food Fix Kitchen Pantry now. Then come back and read the post!)

When I decided to go to culinary school shortly after I packed my 19-year-old son off the Culinary Institute of America, I couldn’t wait to get my very own chef coat and enter the professional culinary world myself. I wasn’t thinking about inspiring others. At 52, with a professed preferred bedtime of 10 pm,  I was barely hanging on to the whirlwind I had set in motion by entering that “second course” of my life with it’s long commute into The City, and it’s late night classes.

My fourth year into this “reinvention”, with my blog gaining popularity and the cooking school booked well in advance these days, the subject of 99 per cent of the emails I get from readers, or people that have seen me on TV, or read about me in the press, are about how inspired they are by my story and what I’m doing. I have one of those “who me?” moments every time. Hey, I’m just over here trying to keep boredom and brain atrophy at bay for as long as possible, and hopefully earn a living doing something I love. But inspiring others? Cool.

So far this year I’ve been asked by one charitable organization to speak on a panel of “women we admire,” to teach a workshop for a women’s group conference on “Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things,” and I’m working on a presentation for another group called “Reinvention at Any Age.” There is nothing like the spectre of an expectant audience that has paid good money to hear and see you, to make you sit down real fast and figure out what you are going to say in order to entertain and inspire.

The three graphics you see here are part of what has come out of some of these sessions in which I face a blank page and wonder just what it is I believe in, or how I try to live my life, or in what way I could possibly be an inspiration and yet not take myself too seriously.

A few whimsical kitchen tools, and a few thoughtfully placed words and arrows later, I have what I think is my credo. And since I am a chef after all, it makes total sense to want to turn these into tattoos. And since I want to share them with you, it makes sense to turn them into fun temporary tattoos that you can wear or not wear on a whim, or give to someone you love for Valentine’s Day (or any day) who needs a little “stirring  up”.

Get some tattoos inside my new Food Fix Pantry. It’s the “store” I’m sort of starting…mainly to offer up stuff like this that I design (I see t-shirts, aprons, and grocery totes in my future) and other unique things I may come across that I want to share.