the practical and delectable virtues of meatballs

Hi, wow, look: This space has gotten a little bit prettier since last time. In my continued effort to keep this thing humming, I figured I might as well make the grazing experience a tad more aesthetically pleasing. (Lipstick on a pig, maybe, but I’ll do anything to get motivated to write.)

Since I last newslettered, I had a pretty gluttonous week that included three restaurants I’d been wanting to try for ages, a night at the neighborhood pizza place and probably not enough cooking at home.

But after 10 days of cooking for one and sighing every time I opened a container of leftovers, I think I earned it.

We all have them: the stories we’ve heard about ourselves so many times, we forget we weren’t there and sentient. Our imagination tricks us into inventing memories; it blurs the line between the doing and the telling.

One of my stories unfolded sometime around 1992, when my mom shared her fears about my vitamin-poor dining habits with my godmother. She was worried I was stunting my growth, that I’d become a pale, pathetic, wispy little child. (Pale, unfortunately, was beyond fixing.) My godmother, so I’ve been told, assured her I’d snap out of it. I was bound to eat a salad someday.

I picture this conversation taking place in my parents’ kitchen, with its blue-and-white wallpaper and gray formica countertops. It’s dark outside, and we’d just finished a dinner during which I’d refused to eat anything but a volcano of mashed potatoes erupting with butter.

In those days, mashed potatoes were it. My manna. Later, it was fried eggs. Then Frosted Mini-Wheats. For a while, Fage Greek yogurt and Luna bars. There was a period when I bought a very specific loaf of cheese bread from St. Louis Bread Co. (don’t you dare call it Panera), which was good for about 10 turkey sandwiches, or lunch and dinner most days of the week.

At some point, I began to occasionally interrupt that litany of sameness with a passing vegetable. By the time I got my driver’s license, I’d eaten arugula and squash and avocado. Green, orange, green. Salmon checked the box for pink, strawberry for red, eggplant for purple. I made ratatouille one night after school and learned all the tricks you have to pull to master good jambalaya. I grew to five feet and five whole inches tall. My mother exhaled.

But I’ve never fully made it past my food Groundhog’s Day. I still eat the same breakfast item for four months straight, then quit it cold-turkey without any real reason why. Some of these choices must come down to compulsion, or a glitch in my DNA, but others are born of necessity — the necessity in this case being that I married a baseball writer.

Let me tell you: It’s a gastronomical challenge. By and large, we’re a household of elaborate meals, and by and large, the baseball writer lays waste to leftovers before they’ve slept a night in the fridge — but when he’s at spring training or on a three-city road trip, everything I cook feels like an insurmountable challenge. (I know there are all kinds of smaller-scale recipes. I just… can’t seem to ever end up cooking them.) And since I’ve been Frosted Mini-Wheat-free since 2008, I’ve had to find some creative solutions. The best one, by far, is meatballs.

Meatballs, done right, are delicious little chameleons. Put them on pasta. Serve them the next night with a crusty wedge of toasted and olive-oiled baguette. Then on a sandwich with some melted provolone. Then maybe back on pasta; switch out your spaghetti for rigatoni, stick ’em in orzo. No pasta’s off-limits. Meatballs will make you forget you haven’t washed your hair since the last full moon or spoken to anyone but your cat since Tuesday.

But how to do them right? Through a whole lot of experimentation, I’ve decided baking — the dullest of the food preparation methods — works best. As much as I want to love browning these guys in a pan, as much as I love the color that results from said browning, I’ve lost too many meatballs to sticking, crowding and uneven cooking. And who cares about the color? The whole point is to slather them with sauce.

Baked meatballs come out intact and evenly cooked, and it’s pretty easy to ditch the frying pan, even if your recipe calls for it. Twenty-ish minutes at 400 to 425 degrees should be the sweet spot if you’re making a standard-size meatball.

My favorite meatball recipe is this one, from Smitten Kitchen, with a few caveats: Be generous with the red and black pepper. Try grating about a quarter of a medium-sized onion into the mix (in addition to the onion powder). And never skip the fresh parsley. Also, if you’re looking to stretch the meatballs for several meals, definitely make 1.5 times the sauce.

These chicken meatballs from the New York Times were another recent success, and the baking principle holds. Eighteen minutes at 400 degrees did the trick, and the sharp garlic yogurt sauce paired perfectly with the slightly sweet and spiced meat. I added a few crumbles of feta for extra tang.

Next time, I’m going to make these homemade flatbreads (more on them next week), slather them in yogurt sauce and wrap them around the meatballs and some crunchy lettuce.

Thanks to this Atlantic story, I now know Judy Blume and I have wildly opposed Wordle strategies. This is mostly devastating, as I can think of no higher compliment than being on the same wavelength as Judy Blume, so by the transitive property, I’m a failure. The good news, though, is that the story is great and will make you all kinds of nostalgic for your childhood library.

I’m only halfway through it, but “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver is the best book I’ve read in ages. I’m in danger of pulling an all-nighter by accident.

I’ve realized over the years that Instagram isn’t the best place for recipes or restaurant recommendations — at least from the influencer accounts the app is always trying to sell me in the explore tab. (Related: I yearn to be a person who never clicks the explore tab.) This story, from Washingtonian, dives into the wild world of food influencers in D.C. It’s eye-opening, and not in a good way.

When my husband and I first toured the house we eventually bought last year, we looked at a piece of built-in cabinetry in the kitchen that the previous owner had used as a coffee bar and a spot to mount a small TV. “Bar,” we said at the same time — as in no coffee, just liquor. When we eventually went under contract, the previous owners relayed the message that they’d do us the favor of leaving the TV. My response was something along the lines of, “Sure, but I’ll just yank it off the wall and take it to the Salvation Army” — and that’s exactly what I did.

Now that space holds a relatively unhinged collection of liquor, everything from cachaça for caipirinhas to obscure Italian apertivo. (Wine and beer are in the basement, and whiskey’s in the dining room cabinet.) I’m at the point in my life where I can say without a hint of sarcasm that my house is my favorite bar in D.C., which means I’d be slacking if I didn’t sometimes devote a corner of this newsletter to imbibing.

We’ll kick things off with an experiment; if drinking is a religion, then this one probably makes me a heathen. Last week, I bought David Lebovitz’s “Drinking French,” and the other night, I became fixated on making a picon bière — essentially a French shandy. I was under the mistaken impression that we had Amer Picon on the bar and plenty of lager in the beer fridge, but by the time I realized neither of these things was true, I’d already decided: I wanted a beer cocktail.

Somehow, my desperation yielded genius. I’m calling it a Baltimore shandy: 1 cup Natty Boh, ¾ ounce Amaro Ciociaro. Thank me later. Or unsubscribe.

Classier cocktail dispatches to come. Maybe.