Yesterday evening I tried to make Greek meatballs, and I thought I had all the ingredients to make Ann's recipe, but I didn't have spinach, and so I decided to make a similar recipe from Greek Cooking in an American Kitchen, which had been recommended during our Phyllo workshop at Jessy's house a few years ago. BTW, I also did not have parsley, but I wasn't too worried about that, and I also planned to use ground turkey instead of ground beef. Anyway, here's the recipe from the book:

1 pound ground beef

1 cut finely chopped onions

1/4 cup finely chopped parsley

2 tbsp finely chopped mint (or 1 tsp dried mint)

1 egg

1/4 cup water

1/4 cup long grain rice

1 tsp salt

Dash pepper

3 cups chicken or beef broth

1/4 cup butter

Avgolemono sauce

4 large eggs at room temperature

1/3 cup lemon juice

2 tbsp flour

----------

Combine beef, onion, parsley, mint, egg, water, rice, salt, and pepper; form into balls 1 inch in diameter.

In a deep saucepan, bring broth to a boil; add butter. Drop meatballs into broth; cover and simmer 25 to 30 minutes or until done. Remove meatballs, reserving broth.

In a medium bowl, beat eggs until thick and lemon-colored. Gradually be in lemon juice. Very slowly beat in reserved hot broth. Add flour and continue beating. Pour sauce into saucepan with meatballs. Shake saucepan back and forth to mix sauce into meatballs.

_________________________________________

That recipe seemed a bit bland to me, and so I turned back a couple of pages to check out the Keftethes (Meatballs) recipe, and noticed that it included garlic and oregano in the meatballs (along with white bread crumbs soaked in red wine), and so I decided to add 3 cloves of garlic to my meatball mixtures along with some Greek oregano from my garden and some dried oregano as well (since my fresh oregano is still young).

When I added the meatballs to the broth, they tended to fall apart somewhat (although they stayed mainly intact), but they came out much blander than I would have liked. I did add lemon zest to the mixture (as Ann recommended), but I think they needed either more mint (like twice as much), more Greek oregano, and/or some fresh dill - another recommendation from Ann.

I think I will try to follow Ann's recipe more closely next time and definitely add the option dill and increase the amount of mint, although if I have spinach, I probably won't need to increase the mint. I didn't fry a sample of the meat mixture to taste test, and maybe I should have done that (as Ann suggested in her recipe).

I served the meatballs on top of fettuccine, but next time I might use wide Dutch egg noodles. I have quite a bit left over (I multiplied the recipe by 1.5, since I had 1.5# of ground turkey), but next time I will make a smaller batch, as the meatballs got crowded in my saucepan.

Does anyone have some variations to this recipe that they especially like? I did like what I made, but I felt it needed to be spicier, and I don't think the omission of parsley made that much difference ... or did it? I also did not use butter, and instead made a roux with the flour and some chicken fat that I got from the broth that I had made.

Lars