Day 48: late-night therapy
It seems I’m craving meatballs this week, especially after those delectable Black Pudding Meatballs, or, perhaps I’m just addicted the calming crafting process. Yes, it’s time-consuming, but it gives you uninterrupted alone time with your thoughts. Granted that isn’t always a place I want to be, but if you go in with the right attitude it can be very rewarding and the perfect facilitator for some much-needed downtime. When I make meatballs I concentrate on posture and smiling, which leaves me with very little spare brainpower to worry about much else and the whole process becomes somewhat therapeutic and meditative.
Meatballs took their form tonight as Nigella’s Past with Meatballs recipe from Nigella Bites. I love this book; I love its simplicity, it’s deliciously rich in delectable content, and that early noughties styling has a wonderful sense of nostalgia to it.
Nigella’s Pasta with Meatballs
I did this over two days if truth be told; instead of watching TV on Thursday evening, I decided to make these meatballs and cook them in their sauce - ready for a quick dinner on Friday night. I was feeling too restless to sit and watch the TV, but I knew I had to relax and be sure to get my nightly quiet time before bed. As much as I love cooking, it would usually tire me out; I’d be frantically bobbing about the kitchen getting more emotionally and physically tired every minute. However, I have been using this Nigella cookalong to re-train the way I spend my time in the kitchen and it’s really proving beneficial. Playing some cocktail-style jazz, like on Nigella’s TV Shows, really helps with this! I also find if you smile while you do everything it makes for a much better experience, and your attitude and emotion can’t help but follow suit.
Making these meatballs may have taken me an hour longer than in would anyone else, but for the anxiety-training exercise that it proved to be, it was an extra hour I was happy to spend. Inner anxieties tend to build momentum without us even knowing, and then suddenly they surface; sometimes we recognise their protrusion into what we’re doing and other times we don’t. And I think it’s the times when don’t that they can escalate out of control and ruin something we enjoy - likewise if you know it has surfaced yet chose to do nothing about it. I start the task at hand calmly and then each time I feel myself pick up the pace, or become frantic for no reason, I take a deep breath before carrying on calmly once again. It sounds so easy, but we all know it’s not. It doesn’t mean, however, that it’s not possible. Meatball making, for me, has become late-night therapy at it’s finest.
Anyway, on to more fun things now! This is the bowl of pasta and meatballs I grew up loving. It was always meatballs in a tomato sauce for me when eating out at Italian restaurants as a child – vongole was an adulthood discovery – and very little has changed, especially if I’m travelling alone for work and am in need of a little home comfort.
Flavour musings
I love all pasta but my heart belongs to spaghetti, with the room too, of course, for tagliatelle, orzo, conchiglie, gemelli, and okay - all of them! These meatballs were destined for their nest of tangled spaghetti, but I had to mix it with some tagliatelle because there wasn’t enough spaghetti; I like to think it added to its charm. The parsley here is not pretentious decor, I just love its taste!
Despite feeling pretty low this Friday evening, I was very happy to snuggle up to the comfort found in this bowl of pasta with meatballs. Warmth soon filled my heart and all felt right once again.
