Angela Hartnett's meatballs with tomato sauce

Meatballs - not a word that usually conjures up great delight in my soul.  However, I know that lots of people love them, and I figured that maybe my indifference to the meatball was promoted by the fact that I have not really tasted any good meatballs (sorry Ma!).

With this in mind, and meatballs being a warm and comforting meal to have during winter, I was inspired to give meatballs a chance by Angela Hartnett's recipe for meatballs with tomato sauce, found here in The Guardian. 

It is very hard to make meatballs photogenic - after all, they are brown food that are not shiny and pretty like chocolate.  However, don't let the photo put you off - these are seriously good, and restored my faith in meatballs.

Angela's tip for soft, juicy meatballs is to bind them with bread soaked in milk, rather than using an egg, which makes them hard.  The technique worked, although in future I would probably blitz the bread coarsely in the food processor before soaking it in the milk, as I found it difficult to break down the bread chunks in the meatballs, so that I had tasty but unattractive gobs of white bread throughout them.  However, the recipe does result in tender, juicy, tasty meatballs.

I tweaked the recipe by using only beef mince (apparently veal mince is too different for Woolworths), substituting dried rosemary for the fresh parsley, leaving out the anchovies (as I didn't have any) and seasoning my tomato sauce as well as the meatballs with salt and pepper.    

Whether or not you are a meatballs fan, this is a very tasty recipe, and a nice winter staple to have on hand.