Meatballs

Despite this blog's subtitle promising perceptions about programming, cooking and music, the cooking part has been taking a back seat in the past few months. This isn't to say that I haven't been cooking, just that I haven't written about it.

Since having bought a slow cooker less than a year ago, this has become my primary tool for cooking (supplemented by the wok). I've developed about ten recipes which work well in the cooker and repeat them at various intervals. Here's a new one, meatballs and vegetables, which is a variation on this recipe (oven based).

I sliced and diced a few potatoes, carrots, onions, courgettes and pumpkin then placed all the pieces in the slow cooker. I also added some frozen green beans, preferably warmed up in advance by soaking them in hot water. Then I mixed one kg ground beef, three eggs, a chopped onion, 150 grams bread crumbs and some parsley, making about ten to twelve meatballs; these I placed on top of the cut vegetables. The slow cooker was set to high for two hours and then to low for another two hours (the total equivalent of three hours on high); the results were fine. Depending on how hard/soft one likes one's vegetables, another hour on high wouldn't have hurt. One can optionally add some tomato paste to either the meatballs or the vegetables, but I forgot until it was too late.

Most Fridays I use the same vegetable base, adding chicken thighs and drumsticks instead of meatballs. I cook this for about four hours on high and two hours on low, and the results are delicious. In the past few weeks, I've turned the cooker off about an hour before we are due to eat in order to decant 400 ml of the liquid which has appeared in the cooking process; after decanting, I turn the cooker back on. The liquid is used instead of water when making rice, making it both tastier and more nutritious.

I read over the weekend a book called 'Catching Fire', which explains how the 'invention' of cooking caused a tremendous evolutionary leap. Cooking makes the calories in food more accessible but also makes the digestive process quicker and less expensive (again, in terms of calories). The book starts out with the startling position that a human eating solely non-cooked food would probably starve to death within a few months. The 'metabolic economics' part (my term) was very interesting, as was the discussion of mouth and tooth size. The implications of cooking are far-reaching, and one of the final chapters is devoted to how cooking probably created the institution of marriage. 

I was slightly surprised to discover that the material finished about two thirds of the way through the book; the rest of the pages are devoted to notes and a very extensive biography.