This isn’t anyone’s favourite time of year. The weather is cold, damp and gloomy. To make things worse, with the Christmas season behind us, everyone’s favourite topic is scaling back, drinking less and losing a few pounds. Joyless stuff all around.
Personally, I do cut back a little on rich, celebratory foods at this time of year, but I don’t get carried away and suddenly embrace an ascetic diet of salad and tofu.
Instead, I go halfway and take solace in comfort foods, which for me are basically those things that I loved when I was a kid. And like every other child, I had a thing for spaghetti and meatballs. I still do; all that’s changed over the years is the steadily improving recipe.
The recipe I use is actually not mine, but my wife Roxanne’s. She picked it up years ago from her sister Francine, a very good cook who makes her tomato sauce the right way by reducing it slowly to dull the acidity in the tomatoes and bring out their sweetness instead.
Click here for Mark’s favourite tomato sauce recipe.
The key to a good meatball is lightness, and these achieve that by avoiding the usual breadcrumb filler and instead combine the veal with fresh ricotta. All you need to finish the package is some great quality dry Italian pasta, like Rustichella d’Abruzzo, and a nice piece of aged Parmesan Reggiano.
Celebrity chef Mark McEwan is the force behind some of Toronto’s finest restaurants, including Bymark, North 44 and One Restaurant. His latest venture, McEwan, is a gourmet food market at the Shops at Don Mills. You can find his spaghetti and meatballs recipe in his upcoming cookbook, to be published this fall by Penguin Canada, or you can pick it up at McEwan Fine Foods.
