Meatballs Recipe using Bread!

One of the problems of a small household is left over food! For example, a loaf of bread can last me almost two weeks. I don't want to admit this, but the last few slices of bread ended up in the birds' stomach most of the time.

The solution can be put half a loaf in the freezer, but I have this "thing" about frozen bread, therefore I generally don't do it. So, I always wonder what else can I use the bread for, other then toasts in the morning, sandwiches for lunch, bread with butter and sugar for afternoon tea, french toast as a supper? The answer is Meatballs!

I found a meatball recipe online using bread and eggs as the binding agent. I tried it out and the result is amazing. It is so easy and fun to make, I made it as a Meatballs with Tomato Sauce Pasta and it was very well received. The good thing is that it tastes great on its own as well, serve it with ketchup would definitely cheer the kids up!

Meatballs with Tomato Sauce Pasta that I made the other day.

Unfortunately, I can't find the recipe anymore, so here is my not very accurate Meatball recipe (this makes about 40 meatballs):

Ingredients:
500g lamb/beef mince
2 slices of bread
2 eggs, beaten
2 tbspns grated parmesan
2 tsps dried oregano
1 garlic clove, minced
1 big onion, finely chopped

Steps:
1/. Soak bread in beaten eggs for 5 mins. The bread is ready when it soaks up all the liquid without dripping.
2/. At the mean time, cook the chopped onion with a little bit of cooking oil in a frying pan until it is soft. Set aside to let it cool down a little.

3/. Once the bread is ready, pull it apart into small pieces (use your hands to do this) and put it in a big mixing bowl with the rest of the ingredients (including the cooked onion). Mix everything together using a spoon (I used a pair of chopsticks) in one direction. You will ended up with a mixture looking like this:

This is what the mixture looks like when it is ready to be made into meatballs.

(This photo is taken half way through my meatballs making process, so don't panic)

4/. Make meatballs the way you like it. If you don't know how to do it, Google is your friend. The way I do it is to put olive oil on my hands and put a spoon full of mixture in my palm and make a ball out of it. Then put some corn flour or flour on the meatballs so that they don't stick with each other.

Meatballs ready to be cooked.

5/ To cook the meatballs, heat up a frying pan with a bit of cooking oil. Cook meatballs in about 3 batches (depending on the size of your pan and size of the meatballs). Each batch takes about 5-8 minutes to cook, the only way I can be sure it is completely cooked is by tasting it!!

Give it a try, it is so much fun!! Or if you are extremely lazy or have absolutely no time, you can try the Jamie Oliver way of making meatballs - pull the meat out of fresh sausages and make it into meatballs, there you go, nice and easy!!

Sweet?!

Hmmm Scones...

Unless we plan an action packed weekend, otherwise, London can be quite dull sometimes. (I will get to the scones, read on...)

We planned to drive to Windsor last Sunday about a week and a half ago, thinking that we will get there early, have a swim, wander around and maybe say hello to the Queen if she is "hanging out" in the Windsor Castle.

It was a great plan until it started snowing heavily on Sunday morning?! Now that we are stuck at home, what can we do? Perhaps, build a snowman? No, too cold! Go to a museum? No, takes too long on the tube!! Go shopping? No, too heavy to carry the shopping around! Arrr... what else can we do? Watch DVDs at home maybe?

When we are feeling sorry for ourselves not being able to go, the snowing started to ease a little. So, we decided to carry on with the original plan... (except it is 1.5 hrs late, but who cares!!)

It took less than an hour to drive to Windsor, no traffic whatsoever! ( I guess everyone else stayed at home to watched DVDs!! Ha Ha!). We ended up having late morning tea in a very traditional looking cafe near Windsor Castle, window shopping at Windsor Royal Shopping Centre, had a two hours lunch at Latino Restaurant, went to Eton College and was amazed by the beautiful Eton College Chapel.

Eton College Chapel. It reminds me of the magic school main hall in Harry Porter.

Out of all these activities, I like the morning tea the most simply because of the scones. My experience with scones are mostly from bakeries all around NZ, they are alright, nothing special. I had scones in the US where they call them biscuits, but I am not a big fan of them. However, my Aunt Lucia in Sydney makes very very yummy cheese scones, very moist and tasty.

The scone I had in the little Windsor cafe is completely different though! It is warm, very soft, it tastes wonderful when you put cream and jam on it and it melts in your mouth! The texture of the scone was perfect!! It was so good that I have eaten half of Mas's scone as well!!

With a cup of tea, there were nothing more I can ask for! Hmmm...scones

The perfect scones served in a little cafe near Windsor Castle.

It might sound crazy, but I would consider going back to Windsor soon just to have the scones. This time, I will have at least two scones all by myself!! Sweet?

London, we are here to stay!

It is all go go go now! Because Mas and I have both landed jobs this week!! WOOHOO!!! =))

The recruitment agents asked why I did not sound happy when he told me the good news, it is because all these things were processing in my head all at once:

1/. Where should we live? (Both of us are going to work in the city, so we can live anywhere, should we stay west, go north, maybe north west???)

2/. How much can we afford? Should we budget more on rent or travels or save as much as possible?

3/. How would I get to work if the tube staff go on with strike next week? (The latest news is the potential tube staff strike which was supposed to happen next Monday to Wednesday is now suspended! Yeah!!)

4/. What am I going to wear on my first day????!!! (This is very very important, because first impressions last... arrr, a lot of ironing to do!!)

Anyway, so it is all very exciting now, but flat hunting has been very tiring. We saw 5 flats within 4 hours. It does not sound too bad when you have it in writing, however, when you are in a car with an agent who thinks he is a race car driver AND does not know the way, after the third 3-point turn, I was ready to throw up. (By the way, the flats range from "NO WAY" to "Hmm... No", so no luck there - Yet)

Tomorrow, we are going to see 3 more flats in the North of London, hopefully we will have better luck with the agent's driving and the quality of the flats this time.

My friends and I at Trafalgar square after a yummy yum cha lunch last Sunday

Sweet?!