Grandpa Gotta Cook—Italian Meatball and Rice Casserole
Sometimes Things Don't Go According To Plan
They go wrong. Despite everything you do, and in spite of your best intentions. But then, after all is said and done, things work out. Sometimes it's hours later, when everyone has given up and has eaten something else, but hey. Silver lining, right?
That's what happened to me last Saturday, when I attempted to make a meal I'd never tried before: Italian Meatball and Rice Casserole.
Welcome to this week's edition of Grandpa Gotta Cook, published in conjunction with the good people behind @foodfightfriday. Let's go shall we?
Setting The Table
I've tried to make it clear over the months that I cook under duress. Okay, it's not quite that bad, and there are times where I actually derive some amount of satisfaction from cooking, but for the most part, it's just stress.
So, when I finally decide on what I want to make for a specific dinner, I don't like curve balls. Which apparently means, not letting anyone know what I'm going to make ahead of time. Mostly my wife.
On Monday last week, I was pressed into making dinner, since I'd missed out on the Saturday prior. So, I made some kind of pasta dish. People seemed okay with it.
However, that still meant I needed to cook last Saturday. For some reason, I'd been craving spaghetti for quite some time (at least a few weeks, since a church fundraiser and dinner that featured spaghetti that I didn't get any of because I was at home sick). I decided that I would go with that. Since I'd done made spaghetti and meat sauce many times before, I figured it would be quick and easy.
During the course of a telephone conversation, I tell my wife. She says she's tired of pasta (she'd been eating Monday's leftovers for work). This is halfway through Saturday, and I'm literally sitting in the Safeway parking lot getting ready to go in to buy some french bread when this conversation goes down. I say fine, I'll figure out something else. I never actually make it into the store.
I've still got Italian stuck in my head, though, so I go digging around the internet and come across this recipe that's supposed to take literally no brains or time at all to put together. That should have been my first red flag (so very little is so drop dead easy), but I allow myself to be fooled once again.
Instead of pasta, the recipe calls for rice, something I know my wife likes. It also calls for meatballs of the frozen variety, of which I don't have any. But I do have a pound of beef and a pound of pork, and after poking around more for a meatball recipe, I figure I'm in.
Time Mismanagement
Those who have been in business or have taken a project management class should be familiar with the term scope creep. In very simple terms, it's when agreed upon tasks turn into more tasks that weren't agreed upon and thus not accounted for, meaning more time and more money.
Well, in my case, two things regarding scope creep occurred—I didn't have all the ingredients I needed, and I somehow miscalculated about 40 minutes of meal prep.
The recipe for the casserole asked for diced tomatoes. We didn't have any, and even though I had been near a grocery store earlier, diced tomatoes wasn't on the list for spaghetti. And since I didn't have the frozen meatballs, that meant preparing all of that ahead of time to put into the casserole.
So, even though I was hoping to have everything into the oven by four, so we could eat at five, it was shortly after five that everything was finally read to go. Since it was a minimum of 60 minutes to bake, that meant we'd be eating after six.
Or would we?
The Meatballs
The recipe called for two to three slices of white bread that were torn up into pieces to which shredded onion could be added. I've never shredded onion before, but it's worse than cutting when it comes to the old tear ducts. The onion was supposed to seep into the bread and break it down, but it didn't ever seem to do that. I kept mixing and the onion kept soaking in, but the bread persevered.
At this point, I was supposed to mix up the meat with an egg and a bunch of seasoning, but the frozen packs of ground beef and ground pork I'd taken out three hours before were still far from sufficiently thawed. So after both meats were in their separate Ziploc bags, I put them in containers with hot water in order to speed up the melting process. Even so, it still took longer than anticipated.
The Casserole
In the meantime, I started mixing the other ingredients: Egg, garlic, salt, black pepper oregano and basil (the latter two which I substituted for parsley—recipe said I could). While that sat waiting for the meat to be ready, I poured some marinara sauce into a baking dish, added the diced tomatoes that I made another trip to the store for, and added rice and water. While that sat, I got the oven heating up to 375 degrees Fahrenheit and checked the meat.
The beef was ready, but not the pork. I took out as much that was ready of the pork and started folding it in with the beef into the bowl with the bread. While I was mixing that up by hand, the remaining bit of ground pork was thawed enough to add in, and after some more mixing, I was ready to shape the meatballs.
There were four of us adults who would be eating, so I made 20 large size meatballs, figuring that would be enough. The meatballs went into the sauce and rice mixture I had previously created and all of it went into the oven for an hour.
An Hour Later...
While it all baked, I came out to my home office to check out what was happening on STEEM in my absence, then went back to see the casserole.
When I did, the meatballs looked like they had cooked okay, but the casserole was still rather soupy. Worse, the rice had not cooked at all! What?!? How could this be? And closer inspection found that the meatballs were only browned on top!
At this point, I surrendered. The food was already late, it still wasn't ready, and I was done. I apologized profusely to everyone and threw up my hands. My wife who was home from work said it was okay, don't worry, she'd make some BLT sandwiches. She'd put the casserole back in the oven. After turning all the meatballs over, she also decided to put tin foil over the baking dish, something I had failed to do. As she was doing it, I checked the recipe and discovered I'd managed in my haste to overlook that small but very important detail.
Another Half An Hour...
I didn't eat the BLT sandwich. I was too distraught. I also figured I'd wait to see if the foil did the trick. Thirty minutes later, my wife let me know that it was done, and that it was good. Some of them had tried it. So, I came back in and got a helping along with some salad.
Taste Test
After all of that, It was pretty good. It reminded me of the Spanish Rice the lunch ladies would serve up in grade school, except it had more of an Italian zesty flavor to it rather than just straight up tomato. Both my wife and my younger son said they liked it, and so did the daughter-in-law, when she got around to sampling it the next day.
Moral Of The Story?
Don't let me cook? Okay, okay. Read the instructions. All of them. More than once preferably. Especially the part about covering the dish. And I'm to make sure if I'm making a part of the meal that's supposed to be premade, factor in the time for it, and start earlier.
Sigh.
All images courtesy of Glen Anthony Albrethsen
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!sneeze
Hope you are not planning on cooking for somebody else in the next 48 hours ;)
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Hey, @bluerobo.
Fortunately, as it would now appear, I don't have to cook until next Saturday (I think). Looks like I need to go sleep this off, since I'm almost 24 hours into it. Later! :)
Sometimes when i make a meal, probably the one i have not tried before just like yours, it can be so horrible amd sometimes it works out well
I'm sure it happens to everyone at some point, where things don't go the way they should. I've been cooking long enough, and pretty much depending on recipes to get me through, that I should have paid more attention to what was written. But, I didn't, and so now I'm back to needing to figure out something for dinner again. :)
That doesn't look half bad.
I never really cook and when I do it usually ends poorly but I can bake fairly well. I should whip something up the next time I'm off now that I think about it.
Hey, @artisticscreech.
I really need to find a way to relax, since that's what things like cooking and gardening are supposed to do. For me, it's the exact opposite—it just gives me time to think about all the things I'd rather be doing. :)
It turn out pretty good, if you like the taste of marinara.
Up until about three years ago, I wasn't cooking regularly, either. But my wife has been working instead of me, so she doesn't get home until after dinner most week nights, and the daughter-in-law or my son does most of the cooking, so once a week keeps me in practice, even though things have a tendency to go sideways when I try new stuff. :)
For a man to cook it is generally fantastic, so you did it very well, despite the little troubles. Looks delicious
Hey, @magnata.
I suppose in some cultures, the man never cooks, and in others, he always cooks, but in my case, I wouldn't call it fantastic. :) However, I think things have a way of working out, and for the most part, I like what I cook even if it fails to please everyone else.
I think it did turn out pretty good. I wish I had taken the photo of the cooked dish before people got to it, but I wasn't fast enough this time. :)
A few remarks.
If you need to thaw it fast, put it in cold water. Sounds counterintuitive but it works very well. Don't use hot water. It messes up your meat.
Meatballs:
Chop onions and garlic. Fry them in a pan - not too much.
Mix minced meat, garlic, onions, mustard and a little dough.
As an optional step you can let it rest in the fridge for 30 minutes - your balls will be more stable.
Then you form your balls.
I suggest to fry them a little before putting them in the casserole.
Enjoy :)
Hey, @bluerobo.
Thanks for the few remarks. All very sound. I've heard about the hot water, so next time I'll try the cold.
As for the meatball recipe, sounds tasty, especially the mustard. When you say dough, is that just a little flour, water and salt or something?
I thought about frying them up a little before putting them into the casserole, but I was trying to make up time (and ended up doing the opposite), so there you go. Hard to cut corners when it comes to cooking and have results worth eating. :)
Sorry. Yes. Only Flour. Just sprinkle a little. Only a little. No water and definitely no salt.
Well plans often go astray and you coped well with the bumps in the road of this cooking experience and everyone seemed to like it so the end result was good
Hey, @tattoodjay.
Well, my wife bailing me out certainly helped. I might have figured out the tin foil on my own, mainly because I would have been forced to retrace my steps through the recipe, but I can't take credit for that at all.
It's true though, regardless of where I was throughout the process, the outcome was good. I probably should focus on that, right? :)
Well I choose to ignore that part, sure you would have thought of it on your own, yes focus on the end result is the way to go, well when the end result is good lOL
That’s not to bad. But than again I have been banned from the kitchen many years ago. I had to sigh a contract stating that if I boiled water I loose 95% of everything. So keep cooking. Making mistakes is OK 👍
My sons cook and cook well. I wish I learned
Hey, @wolfhart.
What do I gotta do to get banned from the kitchen? Set some dish towels on fire (accidentally, of course)? Burn the water? Use salt instead of sugar? :)
Yeah, keep cooking, making mistakes, so on and so forth. One of these days I should go back through these Grandpa Gotta Cook posts and see if I don't have enough material to make a best of the worst post. Or something along the lines of, How not to cook. :)
It was multiple things. Getting banned from the laundry room was easier. Put an item in the dryer that shrinks, wash colored and whites teoghter.
The trick is , I guess is , I never did any of it to get banned I really wanted to help. I am not a domestic person and we accept that LOL
Despite of all the trouble you went through, it looks great and I bet it tasted great. On the other hand, don't worry, you're doing great, but you need a little bit of practice, so you can estimate how much time is to defrost meat or to cook something. You're going to get used to it, just don't ever give up :)
No my dear friend, you need to cook more 😀
I'm never going to get out of cooking, am I? :)
Yeah, that's pretty much what others are saying. Cook more. More experience. Read the recipe three times! Okay, that last one is me. :)
Many people don't understand that knowing how to cook is a huge advantage, or they don't care. I really appreciate your effort, it's really good you are learning. Don't give up and keep posting about it, I love recipes :)
Ahhh, this sort of stuff happens. The only way it doesn’t happen is through more experience. The foil thing would have been missed by me a few years ago too. Now, I just know these things. Keep on keepin on and you will too. It sounds like the dish turned out well in the end and all we care about in cooking are the results anyway. Good job Glen and happy food fight my friend.
P.s. those BLT’s sound good too 😉. I know, I know, I don’t eat meat but sometimes miss some of my favorite dishes :)
Yeah, yeah, I know. More experience. :)
I think I'll just start wrapping everything in foil now, just to be sure. :)
Okay, I'm not going to do that, and I'm pretty much over the trauma of it all, and will be triple and quadruple checking any recipes from now on. I'll need to change my titles to The Paranoid Cook or something like that. Grandpa Gotta Triplecheck.
Hahaha… “Grandpa gotta triplecheck” is hilarious. I put foil on anything I want to cook faster. I’ll even put foil on pans when the air B and B doesn’t provide lids for the pots and pans. You’d be impressed with some of the lack luster kitchen tools I’ve been cooking with. This air B and B currently though is stocked and ready to rock. Yay!
I remember the first time I made chicken I breaded it and tried to stuff it with ricotta and spinach then flash dried it to a perfect golden crispy outside. After I finished cooking the twice baked potato and whatever vegetable on the side, I cut into my perfectly golden, crispy, cheese and spinach stuffed chicken breast only to find it wasn’t cooked at all. Haha… it was slightly embarrassing and now I’ll over cook meat rather than under cook it probably because of that event in early cooking years. Experience, experience, experience… no way around it 🤷🏼♀️
That sure was a fun read mr @glenalbrethsen, happy Friday, sir! Other than a bunch of full bellies crediting your wife with a victory, how was the rest of your week?
In-what? Structions? What are instructions?
Well, @dandays, it's been decent enough this week. I'm far behind as far as my production and rewards from last week, but everyone here seems to be healthy, moderately happy, and so forth. Both grandkids are growing and learning and picking up on things, and the third is still developing like he should, so it's good.
STEEM takes off or I get a job to help out, things will be better.
Instructions: words or wordless pictures designed to confuse you more than you were before.