December  8 – December 14, 2025

Monday:                              Leftover Chicken and Potatoes with Crunchy Salad

Tuesday:                              Pasta with Sausage and Brocolli

Wednesday:                      Fluffy Pork Meatballs with Toasted Ciabatta

Thursday:                            Bryant Street Tavern with Billy

Saturday:                            Rockaway Fire Ice Pizza / Leftovers

Saturday:                            Winter Pork Ragout with Rice and Salad

You will notice that the date above does not correspond to ‘last week,’ and that’s because, since early December, I have been unable to access my own blog.  How could this happen, you ask?  Well, if I knew that, I wouldn’t have had to wait until Andrew drove in from Chicago for Christmas to set things straight.   

Samin Nosrat Can Cook and Rockaway Pizza

I’m going to begin with the last item in the title – sort of like having dessert before the main course.  My good friend Tim  and I had lunch at Rockaway Pizza in Regent Square last Friday and we both agreed it was the best lunch we’d had in some time.  And that’s because it was the best pizza we’d had – other than Peter’s (Tim’s son and my godson) – for a long time.  Josh Siclkes, The pizzaiolo who started Rockaway in his apartment in Greenfield had been on our list ever since Tim mentioned reading about him, a year or two ago.

We have a revolving bunch of guys get together for weekday lunches from time to time and have discovered some fine joints and good food over the years.  Our latest find before Rockaway Pizza being Stinky’s on a back street in Lawrenceville.  Don’t let the name scare you – these folks can cook, they have a nice beer list and, if you’re like us, the joy of finding a good joint will drive you right into Stinky’s arms.

Samin Nosrat (don’t her name scare you, either) – classically trained, veteran of five-star restaurants and now content to cook for family and friends and you and me – made a splash with her book Salt Fat Acid Heat, some years back.  It was a useful book to read – a lesson in the importance of the four elements in the title and a master class in how to manipulate them.  For home cooks looking for recipes, however, that book didn’t help much.  There were a few recipes, but Samin’s purpose was to teach her readers how to think about food and cooking.  It was like going to, say, high-school culinary arts class minus the hands-on cooking.

With her new book, Good Things, Samin continues the teaching but piles a lot of recipes on top of the guidelines and generic tips about ingredients and techniques.  It is a perfect Christmas gift for someone who likes to cook and wants to learn more about the process.  And some of the recipes, including the one below are absolute dynamite.

One way to get comfortable with Samin, or to discover that you are not, after all, comfortable with Samin, is to listen to the hilarious ‘Home Cooking’ podcasts she does with her friend Rishi (Rishikesh Hurwei) who has the same mania for wordplay as our son, Billy, and livens up an already lively podcast.  And Samin has a deep, rich laugh which is worth hearing for its own sake.

So get busy, cook the meatballs below and check out Samin’s podcast and, if you like, buy her latest book.  It might encourage her to write another, which would please me immensely.

Fluffy Pork Meatballs

[adapted from Samin Nosrat‘s Good Things]

[I don’t know what “fluffy” means here, and I don’t like corny adjectives attached to recipes, but I respect Samin, so I’ve let the recipe title stand.]

PLEASE READ THROUGH THE RECIPE BEFORE COOKING.  THERE ARE MANY MOVING PARTS AND YOU’LL  NEED TO  ALLOW A MINIMUM OF 2 HOURS TO COOK THIS. 

Timing:                                

At least two hours – the meatball mixture needs at least 30 minutes in the refrigerator to set up, and the onion mixture needs about 15 minutes to cool off – if you can put it outside in cold weather, you can speed that up – and the meatballs, once formed, need another 30 minutes in the refrigerator so that they will hold their shape.

Ingredients:              This recipe makes 16 or more meatballs and can feed 6 – 8

1 lb. ground pork, 1 ½ cups panko bread crumbs, ¾ cup whole milk

3 Tablespoons Etra-Virgin Olive Oil plus more for cooking

1 onion, finely chopped (if you have one of those big honkers that Giant Eagle sells, use half)

3 garlic cloves, minced (I used garlic powder)

1 large egg, 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for cooking

½ cup finely grated parmesan – more for serving

1 ½ teaspoons fennel seeds lightly crushed

¼ cup packed, minced parsley, 1 ½ teaspoons chile flakes

¼ teaspoon ground black pepper, 2 teaspoons kosher salt

4 cups simple tomato sauce (see recipe below, or use your favorite commercial sauce)

1 to 1 ½ cups water

Olive-Oil Fried Bread, for serving (recipe below)

Prep:

Combine the panko and milk in a bowl and use your hands to massage the liquid into the crumbs.  Don’t overwork – you want saturated crumbs, not a paste.  Set aside to soak until milk is completely absorbed.

Finely chop the onion and mince the parsley

Cook:

Set a sillet over low and add the olive oil.  When the oil shimmers, add the onion and gently cook, stirring from time to time.  You want to sweat the onions – you don’t want any color.  This will take about 10 minutes, add the garlic and cook for another 30 seconds.  Scrape the onion mixture into a large bowl (you’ll be adding the other ingredients to this bowl, eventually) and allow it to cool.

Form the Meatballs:

When the onion mixture is cool, add the pork, egg, Parmesan, parsley, fennel seeds, chile flakes, black pepper and salt.  Use your hands to combine the mixture well.  Now add the panko and mix gently – you don’t want to overwork which can make the meatballs dense.

Samin suggests that you cook a small patty of this mixture and taste it and adjust the salt and pepper as needed.  I just went ahead and covered and put the mixture in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. You can leave it in the refrigerator for up to 1 hour or a bit longer.

When the mixture is ready, coat a large sheet pan with oil and, using wet hands, form the mixture into 16 meatballs or a few more or less.  Use about a heaping ¼ cup of the mixture for each meatball and don’t overcompress.  Place the meatballs on the sheet pan leaving space between them and refrigerate the meatballs for 30 minutes to 1 hour.

While the meatballs are cooling, make the Simple Tomato Sauce (see below).

Cook the meatballs:

Preheat the broiler, then set the pan in the oven so that the meatballs are 4 inches from the broiler.  Broil until browned on top 10 minutes or so, but keep checking, it may take longer or shorter and you don’t want charred meatballs.

Remove the meatballs from the oven and transfer them to the simmering tomato sauce.  If needed, add more water, up to ½ cup, to ensure that all the meatballs are partially submerged.  Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the meatballs are cooked through – about  8-10 minutes.  Remove from the heat, cover the pan and leave the meatballs in the warm sauce until ready to serve.

Serve:

These meatballs work over rice or noodles and, especially well over olive oil-fried bread (see recipe below).

Simple Tomato Sauce:

You’ll need one 2-ounce can of whole tomatoes, ½ cup of water, 1/3 cup of extra-virgin olive oil, 2 tablespoons of tomato paste, kosher salt, chile flakes, a pinch of sugar and garlic.  Samin suggests 5 garlic cloves, minced – I used a scant teaspoon of garlic powder.  Samin also suggests a handful of basil leaves and stems, which I used.

Pour the tomatoes in a bowl and crush them with your hand, or use my method – use your kitchen sheers to cut them up and a wooden spoon to crush them.

Heat the olive oil over medium and add 3 tablespoons of the oil and the garlic.  Cook gently, stirring with a wooden spoon, until aromatic but the garlic has not begun to color – about 1 minute.  Now add the tomato paste and cook, stirring until the oil turns orange – one minute.  Add the crushed tomatoes and season with salt and add the basil and chile flakes to taste.  Stir regularly, while the sauce comes to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for about 25 minutes, until the flavors come together.  If the sauce starts to seem too thick, add a splash of water.

Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and a pinch of sugar (some canned tomatoes are very acidic and the sugar knocks that down a bit).  Add another scant 3 tablespoons of olive oil and use an immersion blender or a regular blender to purée.

[Note:  This sauce can be made days ahead – cool and refrigerate for up to a week, or freeze for up to 3 months.  Bring it to a boil before using.]

Olive Oil-Fried Bread:

You’ll need some good country bread – we used Pepperidge Farm which is merely adequate, but it’s what we had.  Splurge here – go to a real bakery.

Set a cast-iron pan over medium-high and add enough extra-virgin olive oil to coat the bottom generously.  Yes – as Samin notes, this is “an obscene amount of extra-virgin olive oil.”

When the oil is really shimmering, lay in a slice or two or three (if you have a large cast-iron skillet – you don’t want to crowd the slices) and, once the first side is coated, flip each slice and add more oil as needed to saturate the second side.  Cook, rotating and tending and, after 2 to 3 minutes, when the bread is browned on one side, flip it and brown the second side.

Sprinkle with some flaky sea salt and enjoy.