It's a meatball salad.
So what I'm going to do is make a kind of Cl- I say
in the book, make meatballs, how you make meatballs.
But today, I'm gonna show you how I make meatballs.
We've got some egg, scrambled egg.
We've got some ricotta,
which I liked for the lightness that it brings
into a meatball.
Some pecorino Romano, some breadcrumbs
and a nice mixture of salt, pepper
and this I picked up from Mark and I love, lemon pepper
which adds a little brightness.
Yum!
And some, and some hot pepper flakes too.
So we'll mix that all up
Lemon in everything.
And red pepper and everything, Yay.
Yeah, you gotta have it, gotta have it.
So we mix all of that together
to moisten those breadcrumbs up.
So that we don't over mix when we add the meats.
And then what meats are you going to use?
Well, I was at the market and they had one of
those awesome packets for meatloaf where you get
a little deal.
( Rachael) Yes meat loaf mix!
I love it
(Rachael) Beef, pork and veal!
That's exactly right.
So I kind of just mix those all around
and then get it mixing.
Now, Rachel, you've told people
for years not to over mix right?
Right
Because you don't want to toughen these guys up.
So you're just going to just kind of get it together
and get everything in there.
And then you're going to start forming your meat balls.
And now I wanted to show you here,
that I like a kind of good sized meat ball.
Nice
But I'm going to make probably six or seven of those.
Now what you do when you've got your meatballs
done is you want to brown them all.
You have a couple of choices there.
You can do it in a pan set over the medium high heat
on the stove, a bunch of olive boil rolling around.
I like that.
You can also do them in the oven, with a hot oven
and on a sheet pan like this and just roll them around.
Then what you're going to do,
is put them into a sauce.
And let them cook down.
Now this sauce is also a no recipe, recipe sauce.
Now, it's a marinated salad.
This is very important because it's the kind
of thing you can make out
of supermarket ingredients and get a great result.
What I do, is I take tomatoes and I kind
of macerate them in a little red wine, vinegar oil,
a bunch of salt so that they bleed out.
That was Mark's term,
when he was teaching me the recipe.
You'll want them to bleed out.
So I do that,
I get them going.
And then I layer the marinated tomatoes
over really cold, torn iceberg lettuce.
And what's great here is
that you have these tomatoes that have been hanging
out with celery, black olives, red onion
and they've just kinda gotten soft and amazing.
And then you're putting it
on top of this really crisp lettuce.
Incredible. What else could we add?
What else could we add to make it amazing, huh?
The meatballs. (laughs)
Well, just start nestling a couple of these in.
This I think would be good for just you and me Rach.
We could split.
Oh, easily
We can take that down
my friend, no problem.
But wait, but wait, there's more.
One of the keys to this is a good dressing.
Now or I brought out the nice glass stuff for you
but when it comes to a vinegarette, I like a deli container
because I can really shake it around.
This is simple, simple, simple red wine vinegar,
olive oil, salt, and pepper, but a lot of red wine vinegar
because we want it to have a real tanginess
against the richness of those meatballs.
So now I just laid a little bit on here.
This is a different kind of dressing
of a salad than usual because we're not going to toss it.
We're just going to kind of drizzle it.
This is where you need it.
Right. You're drizzling it where you need it.
And that brightness, the acidity
the layers of texture and flavor.
It's so perfect.
Look at that thing.
Thank you so much for stopping by,
the book is available now.