Meatball Parmesan

I was so busy getting this on the table, I neglected
to get a picture before guests dug into it.

I made an awesome Meatball Parmesan dish the other night for six. It was a combination of two recipes that I happened upon, a wonderful serendipity of my reading appetite.

The first recipe I stumbled upon was this one -- from an Esquire magazine article entitled “The meatball recipe to conquer all others.” Now, who wouldn’t be attracted to a headline like that?

And it is indeed quite the fantastic meatball, made from not one, not two, not three, but six different meats, at least in the version I created.

The recipe, as you’ll see when you click into it, calls for a pound of ground beef, a pound of ground veal, a pound of ground pork, and either a pound of pancetta (an Italian bacon made of pork belly meat) or a pound of cured bacon. I chose to use a half a pound of the pancetta and a half a pound of the bacon.

The other recipe I happened up was in the New York Times for Meatball Parmesan. The recipe is here.

What I did was to substitute the NYT meatballs for the Esquire meatballs.

And, though I have my own red sauce recipe, I did use the NYT recipe for the sauce.

I served it with penne pasta and salad.

This was almost an all-day affair in the kitchen. I started at 11:30 a.m. with the prep of the meatballs, and I was in and out of the kitchen until everyone was assembled for dinner at about 6 p.m.

It was a lot of work, but well worth the effort.