Pork Parmesan Meatballs

Many years ago we belonged to a meat CSA. Once monthly, I drove to beautiful home in Berkeley, where I fetched a box containing the finest meat we’ve ever eaten.

Alas, we left the CSA. Members had to opt for specific monthly amounts: 11 pounds, 17 pounds, or another, higher number I can’t recall. For a household of two, 11 pounds was a reasonable choice, but it meant receiving one superb roast, with the remaining weight made up in one-pound packets of ground chicken, pork, beef, and goat. This grew tiresome as a steady diet, even after exploring every possible variation on mince. Reluctantly, we let our membership lapse.

Eventually our fondness for all things burgeresque reasserted itself. In the interim, the slider craze hit the country. Suddenly something I’d been long been doing chez IK–making little hamburgers–was, well, a thing. Only out in the world, restaurants were adding fancy toppings and baking little buns, trying to earn a buck off the simple premise of making a smaller hamburger.

Next came the meatball craze, affirming once and for all the human fascination with smallness.

Nobody’s disputing the appeal of three mini-burgers or a school of meatballs on your plate (a group? a flight? a murder of meatballs?). But why pay extra for it? Do you know what to do with octopus? Pay somebody to cook that.

Why downsize ground meat, anyway? Tweeness aside, more practical considerations assert themselves here, namely, Becker Muscular Dystophy. It’s a lot easier for John to manage smaller bits of food than big ones. So it was I fell into the habit of making “burgerlets”. I have never cottoned to “slider”, a term I find annoyingly commercial. I am not running a restaurant. I’m cooking dinner.

For whatever reason, burgerlets chez IK are most often made from ground pork or chicken, with lamb making an occasional appearance. Ground beef, a rare purchase, is destined to become a full-sized, completely realized burger.Please don’t demand a coherent rationale for this. I don’t have one.

Pork Parmesan Meatballs rolls burgerlets a little smaller. Don’t eat pork? Substitute ground chicken. This recipe is in fact a riff off Diana Henry’s Chicken, Spinach, And Cheese Polpette, from her worthy A Bird In The Hand.

Ground meats can be nasty bacterial carriers. Be vigilant about cleanliness. Wash your equipment and hands with hot, soapy water. Rub a cut lemon over the board and your hands. I sometimes rub that lemon over my sink and sponge, too.

This recipe calls for some fiddly prep–sautéeing the onion and garlic, fussing with spinach. Taking these steps means a finished dish with greater finesse, but the rushed cook could mince a little scallion while decreasing or omitting the garlic. As for the spinach, cooks wanting to skip the pre-cooking step could finely chop it raw, then toss  it into the meat as is. Or eliminate it, adding minced fresh parsley. I do this all the time. No spinach? Feeding spinach haters? Fresh sage–don’t overdo it–or thyme work beautifully here. Know that both these herbs freeze nicely when bought fresh.

Do season aggressively with salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Otherwise, blandness.