Leftovers #96
Three simple recipes to cook for friends, butter's main character energy and a dream Turkish coffee and cardamom ice-cream recipe 🍨
I had just rolled a sweet little lamb and pork meatball to test its flavours. I had run out of panko breadcrumbs but remembered I had a small jar of toasted breadcrumbs laced with seaweed, so I chucked those in, yet the meatball felt lighter than anytime I’ve made them before. It might have been the extra spoonful of yoghurt. They were bouncy, almost aerated, studded with black onion seeds, no shallots this time, plenty of garlic (both granules and grated), ready to be bathed in a gochujang and tomato sugo-style sauce. Anyway, as I was prepping the control meatball (you always need to test one out to see if you should adjust the mix), I heard a tiny mew from outside my door. I turned down the extractor fan and pressed pause on New Girl, opened the door and a little creature darted into my flat. Small, striped, fluffy, collarless, eyes like Puss In Boots. She (speculative) was the sweetest cat I’d ever seen in my life. I swooped her up and she purred away and each time I opened the door to see where she’d come from, placing her outside, she’d run back in. Kismet?! Anyway I let her chill inside for a bit while I called my friend Jord, a cat mom of two, who said to keep her and post in some neighbourhood groups to find her owner. I was obsessed. Was this the universe offering me a sweet animal to foster?
The meatballs were searing and she could smell the fat so I turned everything off and took a picture of us (for both posterity and to send around). I opened the door once more to see if anyone was looking for her and saw my neighbour who told me the cat in question belonged to our neighbour upstairs. Heartbroken, I chased her around the flat and told her she’d had a great little holiday but needed to go back to her owner. Truly a dog person but this cat had me reconsidering all my life choices and now I just hope she remembers where I live so we can hang out some more. Anyway the meatballs turned out great, no notes, rolled them into big fat clouds, lightly browned them and plopped them back into the sauce to hang out until that evening where they coated far too much linguine for two people. The leftovers of which were hand delivered to my friends Coco and Sam who live down the road for their dinner last night.
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