Potato Hash

As promised earlier I will write abit about the food I use my meat balls on. You can already find couple of recipes from this blog for them.

Potato Hash is very traditional Finnish or Swedish food depends how you want to see it. It is simple to make and when done right it is a really delicious dinner.
This recipe serves 1 very hungry Finn.

Ingredients:

• 2 Large Potatoes
• 1 Onion
• 4-5 Meat balls
• 50g Bacon
• Butter
• 1 Egg
• Salt

Chop the potatoes to small cubes and do the same to the onion. Heat up 2 frying pans and melt some butter on both. Fry the potato cubes on one pan and start frying the onion on the other. Once the onion takes a bit of color throw in sliced bacon and the meat balls. Fry both of them till nicely brown. Season the potatoes with bit of salt. Mix them together and serve on a plate.

The egg in this dish can be served in several ways. The traditional way is to separate the egg yolk and pour the yolk on top of the dish. The other way is to fry the egg till the egg white is tough, but the yolk should mostly stay liquid. Serve this fried egg on top of the dish.

Enjoy with cold lager.

Meat balls with granny's recipe

One of my favourite dishes of all time has been my grandmother's meat balls. This is a variation of my own. And I hate it when meat balls like this and those rubber balls they sell at shops fall under the same category (="meat balls"). It's like day and night, really. Just read ahead.

The amounts of everything except minced meet and eggs are just approximations so feel free to vary them as you wish! Let me just say that the secret is the garlic.

Serves four

The meat balls
600 grams of minced meat (pork-beef)
4 cloves of garlic
2 eggs
1 dl white flour
fresh parsley
black pepper
white pepper
salt
chilli powder
nutmeg

The sauce
4 tbsp of butter
6 tbsp of white flour
5 dl water
1 meat stock cube
soy sauce
white pepper
black pepper
salt
a bit of spicy cumin

With the meat balls, chop the garlic and mix with the rest of the stuff in a bowl. The amounts of spices can vary to your liking. Whenever it's possible, use fresh herbs like parsley in this recipe. If you want the meat balls to be a little bit more easier to shape, add more flour. Then take a small amount of meat paste and rub it in between your hands. Try to form a small cute nest for the meat ball in your hands so it will end up being like a ball instead of tube.

At this point, I'd start making the sauce. Take a large sauce pan or a kettle and drop the butter there and start browning it. Add the flour and be sure to whisk all the time. When the flour gets a bit of colour, add the water. Add the meat stock cube and just spice it up to your liking! I found the spicy cumin giving an elegant addition to the taste.

After preparing the meat balls, fry them in a fry pan with butter. Yamm, grease! This is a surefire way to get better meat balls than baking them in the oven. Just be sure to fry the meat balls on every side and long enough so the core will get cooked as well.

After one set of meat balls is done, take them off and put them into the sauce. Just continue till all the meat balls are done and swimming in the sauce.

Serve with (mashed!) potatoes!

Meat Balls

This is my basic recipe for meat balls. I will be refering to this one later on alot. I personally like to cook quite alot of meat balls at once, so I can do several dishes out of them.

Meat Balls Ingredients:

• 400g Minced Meat
• 1/2 Onion
• 2x Garlic glove
• 0,7dl Water
• Breadcrumbs
• 1,5 tsp Salt
• 1 tsp Pepper
• 2 tsp Mustard

Heat the oven to 200C. Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Knead the dough a bit to make it smooth. Dont add all the water at once, but keep pouring in more as you mix it. The amount of breadcrumbs to use is up to you. Sometimes I dont use any, sometimes I put enough to get a bit thicker paste. The breadcrumbs help if you want to make really round and nicely shaped meat balls, but if you add too much the meatballs will taste like bread.

Bake the meat balls in the oven for about 15 minutes. You can check if the meatballs are ready by cutting one of them in half and if there is any redness, it isnt done yet.