A Greek meatball dinner

I've only been to Greece once. In what feels like another life now, I used to be a music journalist. Every so often I'd be lucky enough to get sent abroad to 'review' a festival.

The deal was an incredibly good one. I'd get a free flights, a few nights in a nice hotel, and the bulk of my food and drink was often paid for by the festival. In return, they'd get a few hundred words of anodyne praise probably read by about 50 people.

On one of these jaunts I got posted to Athens for a few days. My memories of the event itself are cloudy; even a trip to Wikipedia to look up the line-up was no help when it came to reverse engineering any kind of table of events. Even my memories of the city itself are (sadly) dull and blurred. A gyro here, a trip to the Parthenon there. Stray dogs and souvlaki. A picture postcard Athens designed to be taken home by lager-dulled tourists like myself.

No one is going to festivals now. No one is going to Athens now. No one is going anywhere but fucking Aldi.

So in the spirit of reliving a journey I made to Athens years ago, I decided to cook a Greek dinner. The Guardian's Thomasina Miers came to the rescue again with this deceptively simple meatball supper. It is one of the best things I've cooked in 2020, and it's the exact sort of brainless cooking we could all do with at the moment.

The following recipe serves four people very, very comfortably. I'd serve it with ice cold 330ml bottles of Mythos.

Heaven is real

Ingredients:

The Meatballs:

500g lamb mince 

Two to three teaspoons of dried oregano (I used three, the original recipe sugested two)

Three cloves of minced garlic (if you want your balls stuffed with heftier chunks of garlic, go wild and roughly chop the cloves rather than rubbing them against a microplane)

50g fresh breadcrumbs (leave them to soak in two tablespoons of water for ten minutes or so)

The Sauce:

Two tins of chopped tomatoes (these seem readily-available in most supermarkets again at the moment)

Two tablespoons of olive oil

Two cloves of garlic (As ever, feel free to bung in another clove or two if you feel like it)

One stick of cinnamon (In a pinch you could probably use a pinch or two of cinnamon powder instead)

150g feta (A vaguely anonymous 'salad cheese' is a sufficent if slightly less decadent swap if for some reason your local Lidl is fresh out of the good Greek suff)

Orzo Salad:

250g orzo

Half a red onion

Half a cucumber (Halved, seed-scooped, and cut into half moons, please)

Three tomatoes (Slashed into whatever sort of chunk you prefer)

Olive oil

One teaspoon of dried oregano

Whatever feta is left over from the sauce

~*~

Method:

I began by making the meatballs a few hours ahead of the sauce and the salad. The process couldn't be simpler: add the squeeze-dried breadcrumbs to the minced lamb in a large bowl, then grate the garlic in, dump the oregano in there, season heavily, knead the heady mixture before you and shape into 16-20 fabulously fragrant pellets of herby, meaty joy. Line a roasting tin with greaseproof paper, plonk the meatballs in there, cover with tin foil and place in the fridge to chill. Periodically return to the fridge throughout the day to peel the foil back and momentarily fill the kitchen with the scent of your imagined Greek holiday home.

Before beginning the sauce in earnest, turn the grill on to the highest heat possible. To make the sauce - and there really can't be many more sauces out there that are so easy and so, so, so tasty - simply warm the oil in a large oven-friendly frying pan, add the garlic, and stir for a few minutes, watching closely to ensure you don't end up with a pan full of burnt, rank garlic.

Remove the meatballs from the fridge at this point.

Crisis presumably avoided, add both tins of tomatoes, and half a can's worth of water. To this add the cinnamon, season to your liking, and then turn the heat of the hob all the way down. Let the sauce simmer for 20-25 minutes, tasting occasionally. But not too often.

Happy wih your sauce? You should be. Now add the meatballs into the pan, rolling each one in the sauce to ensure an even coating. Cover your pan and let the meatballs poach for around 15-20 minutes.

While they're poaching make the salad. Bring a pan of water to the boil and add the orzo. It'll take around 8 minutes to cook. In the meantime, chop the vegetables to your liking and add to a bowl. Drizzle with a little oil and oregano, and season. Drain the cooked orzo and add to the vegetables. Top with the remaining crumbled feta and give it a good stir.

After 20 minutes of poaching time has passed, transfer the sauce to the oven. Leave under the grill for just a few minutes.

Serve with pitta bread and the cold beer.

Playlist:

In a dream world this is the sort of meal you'd serve up on a holiday with friends, as late afternoon smudges into dusk. You'd have spent a lazy morning by the pool before heading to the beach to eat a simple lunch of grilled sardines and deep fried chips, washed down with a large beer, a large Coke, and a bottle of Vichy Catalan. You'd have spent the bulk of the afternoon doing crosswords under the blazing Greek sun, pausing every so often for a refreshing dip in the sea. Pleasantly tired - the sort of tired one only feels after an idle day at the seaside - you'd all traipse back to the villa. Showered and changed, someone opens a bottle of chilled rose. You look out at the muted blues of the pool basking in the day's last light. You get this playlist on. You smile.




Salud!