Time for a recipe!
Mashed potatoes with meatballs and sauce. (enough for 4 people, time to prepare around 40 minutes)
500 gr. chopped meat (ox)
0.3 l of cream
1.2 kg potatoes
Concentrated tomato paste
Ketchup (preferably a mild variant)
Peas
Parsley
Soya
Butter
Roasted onions (pre-made yes, but there's a point to it. Really!)
Seasoning (salt, pepper, sweet paprika, garlic powder, chili, tabasco sauce)
So, that's a picture of the ingredients and the meat. Start off by mixing meat, roasted onion, soya, a little sprinkling of tabasco sauce, chili, salt and pepper and garlic powder. Then roll the meat into small meatballs. It will take some time and be totally boring, but hey, the end result is cool, so don't cheat by making them bigger. The roasted onions added is unconvential, but will make for a good, richer taste, where real onions added like that would take too much time for not much more gain.
Peel the potatoes, add water and salt, but don't cook them yet, since simmering of the meat and sauce is important, so switch to warming up a pan with just a tiny bit of olive oil, and then throw in the meatballs, semi-cooking them in their fat, semi-roasting them. When you can't see any red meat anymore, add in most of the cream, the can of concentrated tomato paste (one of those small ones), an ok helping of soya, salt, pepper, paprika and the garlic powder, but just a little of the last, or it will influence the final taste too much. Leave it out if unsure 
Mix it and let it simmer for now.
Get the potatoes cooking, for around 20 minutes, and check up on the sauce all the while, stirring it. The colour of the sauce should go from red to a deeper brown. Start up the peas too. If using frozen peas, just add a little water, not too much, or it will absorb the taste of the peas. Warm them up slowly, then boil them a minute near the end.
Now, add some ketchup to the sauce, stir a little, taste and then add in any extra seasoning and soya as needed to get the taste you want. I go for a deep, strong flavour that is enriched by the long simmering myself, as this is what will complement the meat. Add in more cream or some milk if you think the sauce is turning out too strong.
Also, wash and cut the parsley to be used when the potatoes are finished. I usually do that by putting it in a cup and then using a scissor to cut it into tiny bits.
Time passes, and the potatoes will now be ready to get mashed.
I have this nifty tool for mashing them, which is pretty much needed to get out any larger chunks mashed. Add in as much butter as you like to get the right taste, complement with more salt and some of the leftover cream (usually you'd use milk, which is fine if you have some, but if not, the rest of the cream works ok). When you're satisfied with the taste and have mashed it to a unified paste, add in the parsley for a nice colour and taste, and you're good to go. At this point, you should have boiled the peas too, and everything's set!
Here's the final result plus some sour cream and onion chips which work very well with this. I would also add a glass of red wine to go with this dish, but as you might have seen on the first picture I only had white wine that day. Anyway, it's tasty!
You can also, as is more common, do this dish, or a variant of it, with spaghetti. I usually do that, but the mashed potatoes variation worked out even better 
Last edited by Darkhawk (2007-04-26 22:19:08)
:o:mad:
