Today's Recipe: Porcupine Meatballs

A Sanderson "Family Recipe"

Ingredients:

• 1 beaten egg
• 1 10-3/4-ounce can condensed tomato soup
• 1/4 cup long grain rice (uncooked!)
• 1/4 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1 pound lean ground beef (not extra lean, it needs to hold together)
• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano, crushed
• 1/2 cup water

My father would make Porcupine Meatballs when I was a kid, so they're kind of a comfort food. Kind of a kid's food, too; big ol' balls of meat in a tomato sauce. My father insists it's a family recipe, even though I found Porcupine Meatballs in The Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book-- on the same page as the Sanderson family recipe spaghetti sauce. I'm not ragging on my father, though: there are plenty of similar recipes on the web. So here's one of them.

Combine the beaten egg, 1/4 cup of the soup, uncooked rice, onion powder and pepper. Add the beef and mix it in. You can use a fork, but you'll be using your hands eventually, so wash up and dig in.

So where the heck did "porcupine meatballs" come from anyway? Is it a Jewish food? A Southern food? Cajun??

Other versions of this recipe like to add chopped onion and even green pepper. Now would be the time to mix 'em in.

Shape firmly into 20 meatballs. Or 8 meatballs, depending on how you were raised. Place them in a large skillet.

Mix the remaining soup with the Worcestershire sauce, oregano, and water, and pour the mixture over the meatballs. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and cover. Simmer, stirring often, about 20 minutes or until no pink remains inside the meatballs and the rice is tender.

GameSpy has a Porcupine Meatballs Recipe! It even comes with an Age of Empires scenario! I'm not kidding!

Da Chef: You scoop together some meat, pour a can of Campbells on it and call it a Dwarven delicacy? A feeble attempt at mouth-filling!

Tondor: That recipe has been passed down for over 27 generations of my esteemed family!

Da Chef: I am amazed that none of your family lineage has starved to death with the lacking of the culinary skizzles[sic]! You are an affront to the buds of taste. Out of my sight, grubby little kneebanger! Your stunted growth is explained at last.

Tondor [Picking up his axe:] Fromage, I call upon thee the Dwarven engine of might, brought to you by the new Gillette Mach 3. This means war!

Da Chef: So be it!

Skim the fat. You want a good sauce, so I usually remove the meatballs and dump the sauce into a flask, let the fat rise, then spoon it off and dump the not-as-fatty sauce back onto the meatballs. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese if you like, though I don't remember anything about that from my childhood. Serves 4 or 5.

Why do all web-based recipe calculators suck? They're all using the same data, but I never get good results. I need a book or something. Or I should just put more effort into it.