CK’s kitchen: Porcupine meatballs

Posted in cooking, Healthy eating
by Lorain County Moms

Porcupines

• ¾ cup diced onion
• 1 teaspoon oil
• 1 tablespoon water
• 1 pound lean ground beef
• 2 cups cooked brown rice or long-grain white rice
• Coarse-grained salt and cracked black pepper
• One 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes with juice (or crush canned whole tomatoes yourself)
• 1 bay leaf

Porcupine meatballs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place onion and oil in a nonstick skillet over medium heat and stir until onion is coated with oil. Add water to pan, cover and cook until onion is completely softened, 15 to 20 minutes.
Place meat and rice in a mixing bowl; add onion, season with salt and pepper, and mix to combine.
Form into 8 sleeping porcupines (round balls) and place in a baking dish just large enough to hold, but don’t squish them.

Pour tomatoes with juice over porcupines; season with salt, pepper and bay leaf.

Bake 1 hour. Remove bay leaf before serving. Makes 4 servings.

Source: Cooking Thin with Chef Kathleen, 2002

No hunting involved

Call it animal attraction, but when I saw the name of this recipe — and quickly scanned the ingredients — I knew I had to make it. These porcupines were plucked from the cookbook “Cooking Thin with Chef Kathleen,” a recent splurge from a trip to Half Price Books, my favorite place to find reasonable books of any nature, especially food. Not normally up for game of any sort, the idea of forming pseudo-prickly creatures from brown rice and lean ground beef sounded quite adventurous.

Allow two hours

What I loved about this recipe was that I had ALL the ingredients in my house. Any home cook can appreciate the extreme rarity of this event.

It has to be one of the first times this has happened to me since starting this cooking column, and I seized the moment, even though these porcupines were not really “in season.”

What I didn’t love was the two-hour time span that had to be allotted to make this. It took 45 minutes to cook the brown rice, another 10 minutes for the onions and then 60 minutes for the entire combination to bake. It was all simple stuff, just not a dinner you can throw together at the last minute.

The verdict

These little sleeping porcupines (shaped in circles) looked delicious when I pulled them from the oven.

After letting them cool for about 10 minutes and warming up our veggies, my daughter, niece and I all dug in. The three of us are a picky bunch if I ever knew one.

My daughter didn’t care for it, but my niece and I were willing eaters. My husband doctored his up later by melting mozzarella and Mexican cheeses on top. If I made this dish again, I’d punch up the sauce with garlic, oregano, onion, mushrooms and peppers for more flavor. Salt and pepper alone weren’t enough. Cooking thin definitely doesn’t have to mean cooking bland.

Chrissy Kadleck is a novice home cook and mom of one. She shares her struggles and triumphs in the kitchen — and reviews a recipe in the process — every other Wednesday in The Chronicle-Telegram. To submit a recipe for CK’s Kitchen, e-mail it along with your name and phone number to ckadleck@chroniclet.com. Please include the source of your recipe.