Rest of Chomple Team: Yod, how many booths do you have marked for day 2 of the Fancy Food Show?
Me: One.
Rest of Chomple Team: ONE? What is it?
Me: Meatballs. They tweeted out that they had meatballs.
Rest of Chomple Team: MEATBALLS?
Me: You don't understand, nobody brings meatballs to the Fancy Food Show unless their utterly fantastic.
The meatballs were indeed fantastic. But this is really about the meatballs. It's about being a Kitchen Hero.
If you've been reading this blog for awhile then you know that my favorite kitchen products are what I call Kitchen Hero. These are the products that allow you to make fantastically tasty stuff with little to no more effort than you would have spent making something, well, normal tasting. Impress your family! Wow your neighbors! Avoid getting nominated for one of those "worst cooks" shows! An arsenal of Kitchen Hero products stashed in your kitchen goes a long way to smoothing out untasty situations.
Porta Mangiare meatball mix is definitely something you need to keep around.
It's pretty simple. Take the mix, add 2 eggs, 6 oz of a dry cheese, 1 lb of meat and a tiny bit of water or milk. Mix it up, then cook up the meatballs (oven or pan). Easy.
But, there are plenty of meatball mixes. What makes this one so special?
Porta Mangiare does the hard part: the breadcrumbs and spice mix. Breadcrumbs especially. For any Italian style meatball, the breadcrumbs are the make or break ingredient, although most people don't realize this. Most mixes use your standard, cheap, baking process remnant crumbs. Not this stuff. They actually have three types of bread that are baked specifically for their meatball mix. The bread is then sliced, dried, toasted, and turned into breadcrumbs. That's incredible attention to detail, and you can absolutely taste it in the final product.
For the rest, you can follow their instructions to the letter or mix it up a bit. You determine what kind of ground meat you want to use. You can use Romano cheese as recommended, or use another kind of cheese to change up the flavor (just, please, please don't use the stuff I won't name that comes in a green can. Actually, don't use anything that comes in a green can).
Go get some right now at www.portamangiare.com
