Meatballs (the part of Bill Murray will be played by spinach)

Today was Iris’s second birthday. I’ll be posting about the cupcake portion of the event tomorrow, but tonight I wanted to share a meatball recipe with you. These have been a family favorite since before Iris came along, but she is guaranteed to gobble several of them, so with her approval I made them for birthday dinner.

The great thing about these is that you don’t have to feel guilty if you’re too lazy to cook a separate vegetable, because they’re loaded with spinach. In that respect they’re similar to potsticker filling (meat and greens ground together to make something more delicious than either alone), but the seasonings are Italian. The recipe is based on one from Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s Italian Country Table, but I’ve changed quite a few things.

At bathtime, when I was brushing Iris’s teeth, we had the following conversation. Really.

**Me:** Iris, do you have any spinach in your teeth?

**Iris:** Those meatballs tasty! Not too spinachy.

Surely your kids will agree.

**SWEET AND SOUR MEATBALLS**
Makes about 12 meatballs, serving 4

Equipment note: You’ll need a food processor and a 12-inch nonstick skillet with lid. Well-seasoned cast iron would be okay, but do not try this with a stainless-surface pan or they will stick like hell. An instant-read thermometer is also handy but not required.

This recipe doubles very well if you have a 14-cup food processor, and leftovers reheat perfectly and make great meatball sandwiches. Cook the meatballs in two batches if you double.

For the meatballs:

2 large cloves garlic, peeled
2 ounces pepperoni slices
12 ounces boneless, skinless chicken thighs
5 ounces frozen spinach, defrosted and squeezed dry
1 small onion, coarsely chopped
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
Few grinds black pepper
1 slice rustic bread, crusts removed
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1 ounce grated parmesan cheese
zest of 1 lemon
1 large egg

For the sauce:

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup dry white wine
2 teaspoons sugar
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 cup canned low-sodium chicken broth (or homemade)

1. Place the bread in a food processor and grind into crumbs. You should have about 1/2 cup. Remove to a separate large bowl.

1. Place the garlic and pepperoni in the food processor and process until very finely chopped.

2. Add the chicken, spinach, onion, cinnamon, salt, and pepper, and process until well mixed. Poke through with a fork or spoon looking for unincorporated chicken chunks, and process further until you find any. You’re not looking for a mousse texture, but pretty close. Remove to the bowl with the breadcrumbs.

3. Stir in the 1 tablespoon vinegar, cheese, lemon zest, and egg. With your hands, form into 2-inch meatballs, placing them in a single layer on a large plate. You may cover the meatballs with plastic wrap at this point and place them in the fridge for several hours.

4. Pour the olive oil into a 12-inch nonstick skillet and heat over medium-high. Add the meatballs to the pan and cook until well browned on all sides, turning carefully with tongs. Turn the heat down if they’re browning too fast. This will take about 10 minutes. Pour off or blot any excess fat.

5. Return the heat to medium-high if necessary and add the wine. Cook until nearly completely reduced. Add the sugar, vinegar, and broth, bring to a simmer, reduce heat to low, and cover. Simmer 12 to 15 minutes, turning the meatballs once, until the meatballs are firm and register between 165°F and 170°F in the center.

6. Remove the meatballs to a bowl, raise the heat to medium-high, and boil the sauce down until it’s sour, sweet, and salty enough to your taste. Pour over the meatballs and serve immediately.

Get it while it’s hot

We enjoyed our Vancouver vacation so much that Laurie and I are talking about renting a downtown condo for a week or two next year. It’s one thing to admire kaffir limes and chilaca chiles, quite another to be able to actually cook with them.

“We could even invite some people over for dinner,” said Laurie.

“I have a better idea,” I replied.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to The Splendid Table with Lynne Rossetto Kasper. A caller described a new Paris trend: *restaurants éphémères*, or temporary restaurants. A top chef (such as Pierre Gagnaire and Alain Passard) will open a restaurant and keep it open for a week or two, taking no reservations and serving high-end food at low prices. It’s a way of having fun and keeping the chef’s name in the headlines. Here’s Chocolate and Zucchini’s post about dinner at Végétable, Passard’s ephemeral restaurant of last spring.

So I figure I’ll open my ephemeral restaurant in an undisclosed downtown Vancouver location for one week during winter vacation every year. You’ll have to reserve years in advance. There will be a single menu served to all guests with no substitutions. It would be called Aux Racines et Vers. Iris will open every dinner with a toast, or possibly several pieces of toast.

Okay, I don’t have to guts to do this, and I’m not a good enough cook, but if you want to come by for dinner next December, let me know.

The return of illegal peppercorns

We’re back from Vancouver with some good contraband. On Wednesday took the Aquabus to Granville Island. Iris loved Granville Island, partly because when we said we were taking a ferryboat to the Island, she said, “Just like Frog!” There’s a Frog and Toad story where Frog wants to spend some time alone, so he goes and sits on an island. So presumably Iris was imagining an island of a few square feet in the middle of a pond where she could sit in solitude.

Instead, she ran around the public market building, got extremely rained on, and played at the Kids Market. We played many games of Skee-Ball and won a slinky. I also loved the Island, because I went to Oyama Sausage, which has the most incredible charcuterie case I’ve ever seen. We needed snacks for the trip back. How to decide? I ended up getting some spicy wild boar salami and goose breast prosciutto. The goose prosciutto was especially good, and it tasted remarkably similar to ham. Similar enough, in fact, that when we got to the border, I declared our meats, and our remaining salami was confiscated, but the prosciutto was waved through on the grounds that, “The prosciutto is okay because it’s just ham.”

I also stopped at South China Seas Trading Co, a small Asian imports store that seems to specialize in products that are hard to find elsewhere. They had beautiful looking fresh kaffir limes and, amazingly, fresh green peppercorns. I have been missing fresh peppercorns since our last visit to Thailand in 2001, and here they are. I don’t know if it’s illegal to import them, but I conveniently forgot to mention them at the border, so now they’re in my fridge. I keep reaching in, twisting off peppercorns, and snacking on them. A fresh green peppercorn tastes like a mild tropical fruit (such as green papaya) infused with black pepper. Tomorrow I’m going to put them into a curry.

Limes at South China Seas

Note the fresh chilaca peppers on the right; these are the fresh version of dried pasillas. Since I haven’t been to Mexico (other than Tijuana), I’ve never seen them *anywhere* before.

This is not my first adventure with potentially illegal peppercorns, but it’s the best yet.

Live from Vancouver: Vij’s Rangoli

We’re taking our first-ever family vacation with Iris. This morning we caught the train to Vancouver and are currently ensconced at the [Hotel Le Soleil][LeSoleil], which seems very nice so far. The location is perfect (a couple blocks off Robson and right by to a major transit hub), and it’s amazingly cheap (CAD 125/night for a suite).

We hit [Vancouver Kidsbooks][VKB], where Iris read many books and kissed many stuffed animals, including dinosaurs, poodles, sheep, and a great horned owl puppet. Then we caught a bus to [Vij’s Rangoli][VR].

[LeSoleil]: http://www.lesoleilhotel.com/
[VKB]: http://www.kidsbooks.bc.ca/
[VR]: http://www.vijsrangoli.ca/

Pretty much everyone considers Vij’s (the parent restaurant, as opposed to the Rangoli) one of the best Indian restaurants outside India, and I agree. It’s a full-on experience, though: they don’t take reservations, and the wait is long. While you’re waiting, they ply you with free chai and fried breads, but it’s still a wait. Also, Vij’s is incredibly loud. Plus, they’re closed this week.

Vij’s Rangoli is Vij’s lovable new kid brother, located right next door to the original at 11th and Granville. I was going to say it’s less hip; actually it’s just as hip but in a different way, less dark and more Euro. We got there at 5:45 and were seated almost immediately. Iris liked poking her head into the kitchen, which was behind her, to see the billows of steam.

We pushed Iris to her limit today–up before dawn, a long train ride, then another train ride, then a late nap in a weird crib, then a bus ride, and so on. I was worried she’d refuse to eat, or only gnaw on bread. I had insufficient faith in Vij. We had vegetable samosas, wild salmon cakes, and pork curry with fennel and yogurt. Everything came with sides and chutneys.

Iris gobbled it all. She ate a bite of fishcake. “Spicy!” she declared, and took a big drink of water. Then she ate more. Later, there was one fishcake left, and I said to Laurie, “I’ll split it with you.” I ended up splitting it with Iris. They really were incredible fishcakes, spiced with ajowan and garam masala. The pork curry was sublime. I think curries must be one of the hardest dishes in the world to make really well. Most any Indian restaurant serves pretty good curries, but to take them to the next level, from pretty good to “I want to mainline this sauce” good, I have no idea how you do that. Vij’s does.

The Rangoli is inexpensive. It was $42 Canadian for the three of us. Most amazing of all, nearly everything on the menu is available in frozen or refrigerated takeout pouches, and prices range from about $7-$10. If you live in Vancouver and you don’t have any Rangoli in your fridge, some kind of culinary secret police should be knocking on your door right now.

Two pizzas diverged in a wood-burning oven

Last night I was chatting with some friends about pizza, and there were many harsh words directed at Pizza Hut and its ilk. In principle, I wanted to agree.

In practice, however, I would gladly debate the merits of the Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana rules while eating a Supreme Personal Pan Pizza that has been sitting in the warmer for two hours. I don’t say this as a boast or a *mea culpa*, but I’m glad that I’ve maintained the ability to enjoy low-road pizza while exploring high-road pizza, a trend that is just beginning to take root in Seattle.

My favorite pizza in Seattle–my favorite pizza ever, in fact–is indeed a high-road pie, made at Via Tribunali on Pike Street. Via Tribunali is an über-Neapolitan place. They import their flour and their pizzaiolos from Italy, their menu is printed only in Italian, and at one point they were strongly implying that they were injecting minerals into their water supply to better approximate the hard water of Naples.

In his book American Pie, Peter Reinhart argues that the best American pizzerias don’t try to ape any particular style or chase a certification, but use tradition as an inspiration. Obviously, Via Tribunali is exactly the kind of ape Reinhart is talking about, and when it debuted it garnered reams of bad notices on the food discussion boards: the knives are dull (pizzas at Via Trib are unsliced); the center of the pie is soggy; the mushrooms are canned; the crust is underdone; you set my hair on fire; etc. As a friend of mine wrote, “Via Tribunali reminds me of an Italian motorcycle that I once owned: beautiful, but deeply flawed.”

I went in with low expectations. And indeed, Via Trib’s salami pie is greasy and unexceptional. Luckily, we also tried the Primavera. Crust, tomatoes, fresh mozzarella. When the pizza emerges from the wood-burning oven, it is topped with a handful of arugula and crumbles of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Any greasiness from the cheese is balanced by the peppery bite of the greens. This is a single-serving pie (it’s fairly large, but the crust is very thin and made without oil), and I’m already thinking about when I can next ditch the family and get over to the bar at Via Trib for a Primavera and a glass of wine. As much as I liked having dinner with Laurie there, this is the perfect solo Seattle dinner. (Also, VT is not at all kid-friendly.)

If you’re wondering what the pies at VT look like, I found a photo of a couple (though sadly not the Primavera) on Flickr.

So, I’m looking forward to seeing how the pizza scene in Seattle matures. In the meantime, I’m equally thrilled with the Primavera and with Pagliacci‘s Works Primo, available every other Sunday at the Broadway location. The Works features pepperoni, sausage, onions, green peppers, and olives–better known as a Supreme, and it’s supremely good.