In The Pines

Tonight I was having a hard time coming up with what to have for dinner, which seems to be a common occurrence lately. In the back of my mind was this little package of discounted ground pork that I saw at the supermarket earlier this week. Obviously either someone bought it or it has been discarded by now (I hope), but I started looking for recipes using ground pork. I found one for something that I thought was some sort of casserole by the name, Pork and Lemon Polpentine, but is actually a fancy cocktail type meatball. The original recipe called for sardines which likely would've changed the flavor quite a bit. Instead, they were flavored mainly with lemon and thyme. The meatballs themselves are a little dry, but when combined with the sauce from pan drippings and chicken stock they were actually quite good.

So then I had to ask myself what I wanted to eat with a bunch of meatballs. Since my Meatball Marinara Sub was nearly transformed into spaghetti and meatballs, I figured I'd take the pasta and meatball route. Spaghetti and meatballs wouldn't work quite as well with a thyme and lemon flavored meatball, I figured, so I made Woodland Bowtie Pasta instead. It always amazes me how expensive nuts can be, especially pine nuts. I bought perhaps 2 heaping tablespoons of pine nuts for this dish specifically and it was almost a dollar! I am a fan of pine nuts, but they are not so especially delicious that I'm willing to pay so much very often. The sauce for the pasta is created from the drippings from the meatballs, as well as the flavor of the vegetables and olive oil, one of the simplest ways to dress pasta.

Speaking of pasta, I caught an episode of the new Jamie Oliver series, "Jamie's Italy" and I love it. I think it's really ballsy for a show like his to show something like a boar being hunted and gutted for the dinner of a village. It's kind of shocking and funny to his target audience, since we're all so dissociated with where our food actually comes from. I also think it's humorous how all these old Italian ladies are teaching him to cook and he's just sitting there saying, "I know how to make pasta… please!"