Pork & lemon meatballs - because we don't need to think about the turkey till next week...

You'll have noticed that there hasn't been much about Christmas here. 

It's not that I'm not bothered, not excited, but I'm not planning to do anything different or fancy, and as it's just us here for Christmas Day, and I don't want to have the place groaning with leftovers, I have tried not to over-cater or over-engineer anything.

I'm also quite fancying the approach Alexander Armstrong and Giles Coren took in their '12 Drinks of Christmas' programme that I happened to watch last night - line up 12 festive drinks, and let everything else take care of itself. I won't of course, but it did cross my mind...

I never really read the Dr Seuss books when I was growing up, but the Husband did, and his mum introduced them to our kids - Blue in particular - and there's a bit in How the Grinch Stole Christmas that I really love. It's this bit ('it' being Christmas):

"It came without ribbons. It came without tags. 

It came without packages, boxes or bags. 

And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. 

Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. 

What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. 

What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.” 

I've been concentrating on getting the exhausted children through the last few weeks of school - there have been projects to finish, carol concerts, school discos, the usual end of Autumn term madness - and what with everything else that's been going on, I haven't really had time to think about anything other than the basics, even less blog about it.

 

So on the catering front, at least, I'm taking the 'Grinch' approach. Or perhaps not the Grinch's approach, but that of the Whos - whose Christmas the Grinch was trying to spoil. 

It will be Christmas whether I manage to make cranberry sauce or not. 

Whether the mince pies have homemade mincemeat in them - or the mincemeat from the jar I found at the back of the cupboard which looks perfectly edible but has a use by date of 2009 on it (may be I'll pep it up with some brandy...). Indeed whether the mince pies are homemade in the first place ("Recipe Junkie in bought mince pie shock..." I can see it now).

Whether the Christmas Cake looks like something Mary Berry would be proud of - or not - thanks to Pink's enthusiastic marzipan modelling last night.

Particularly loving Pink's attempt to turn a polar bear into a reindeer...

We will be together, at home, and we will have a lovely time, whether we eat like kings, or not.
 
And anyway, all of that stuff isn't till next week. 

For now, we need to eat normal food; food to keep us going as we wade through the end of term. It would help if I'd been meal planning, but that's gone by the wayside too, so yesterday I was scrabbling around in the freezer and found some pork mince. It's ages since we had meatballs, and the kids love them, so with a little help from Nigel Slater, meatballs it was.


Pork meatballs with mushroom sauce

4 anchovy fillets
450g pork mince
65g breadcrumbs
zest of a lemon; juice of up to 1 lemon (see Method)
handful of flat leaf parsely (leaves only especially if stalks are a bit woody), finely chopped

2 tablespoons (about 15g) grated parmesan
plain flour for dusting/rolling in (the meatballs, not you)
40g butter
olive oil
4 largeish chestnut mushrooms, peeled if necessary and finely chopped
200ml chicken stock
50ml (approx) cream

Mash up the anchovy fillets in the bottom of a large bowl, then mix in the pork mince, breadcrumbs, lemon zest, parsley and grated parmesan and mix together, adding the lemon juice as necessary to bind it all together.

Cover a plate with plain flour.

Using a tablespoon as a rough measure, make your meatballs - I got 14 out of this mixture - flatten slightly, then put in the flour, rolling around to coat lightly.

Heat the butter and oil in a large frying pan, then brown the meatballs on both sides for about 4 minutes - I did this in batches. Once browned, set the meatballs aside, then chuck the mushroom into the pan and cook for a few minutes, then return the meatballs to the pan and cook for another 5-6 minutes, turning occasionally.

Tip in the chicken stock and bring the pan up to bubbling, scraping any bits off the bottom of the pan, then drizzle in a bit of cream. I just had some in the fridge, and I didn't measure it out, but it wasn't much - just enough to turn the sauce from 'stock' to 'sauce' if you see what I mean.

When everything's hot, serve. We had it with a mixture of wild and red rice (cupboard clearing) and some steamed kale.

 And in case I don't get the chance again, 

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

 

Last night, Good Food saved my life...

A bumper issue - you'll see why!

Well, actually, most nights for the last couple of weeks, Good Food has been my saviour. That and jacket potatoes. I have been busy, busy, busy doing lots of things. The day job, the children (book day costumes, times tables etc), and also, quite exciting, some other bits and pieces . It's all been a bit of a roller coaster and I'm loving it, but it's meant that I haven't spent as much time and effort on what we're going to eat.





You see, one of the things that motivates me to cook different things is the boredom that crashes around me when I make the same things week in and week out. Meal planning helps me with this, but recently, when I've been tired and thinking about other things then tried to work out what we're going to eat I have found my mind is a blank, apart from a little voice screaming "No! Not Cottage pie AGAIN!".  

I have a large, and ever expanding collection of recipe books, and with more time on my hands, I'd happily spend hours flicking through, deciding what we're going to eat, but this hasn't been an option recently. That's where Good Food has come into it's own. I blow hot and cold about any magazine. I find that if you get more than a few issues, you start noticing things coming back round again. I've had a subscription to Good Food on and off for the last 10 years at least, but I'll have it and then leave it for a year or so. Some months are good, some are not so good. Every couple of years, I have a clear out an only keep those issues with recipes that I know I've cooked and will cook again. I'm pleased to say that I'm in a subscription year (a Christmas present) because the March issue has really saved me - it's certainly on that'll survive the next cull.

The first article that caught my eye was dedicated to 5 meals for under £25 - a working week's worth of main meals with no thought (and very little effort) required. What I really liked was that the meals involved cooking from scratch, but were quick and easy. This was going to be a post about cooking those meals specifically and whether or not it did cost me less than £25. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that.  I didn't cook them in the order they specified. I made my own garlic bread, too (rather than using a dough mix), for the tomato soup with tear & share cheesy bread, and I didn't keep track of the cost. And anyway, my reliance the March Good Food mag has gone way beyond that one article and so this blog post has become my way of passing on all these brilliant meals to you. 

And don't worry that it's too late and the April edition is on the shelves already. (I know - it's ridiculous, isn't it, that we're less than 2 weeks into March, but I've had my gripe about that before, so I won't repeat that here) All these recipes are online so I've added in the links. Don't say I never do anything for you.

We loved Pasta with ham and Minty Pea Pesto - a kind of jazzed up macaroni peas.

very green - and very delicious

Piri Piri chicken with spicy rice (well, it turned into Reggae Reggae chicken because I had a half used bottle of Reggae reggae sauce in the fridge) was very popular, 

Loads of veg in that rice

and the Creamy Fish Curry was the perfect thing to finish up some disappointing white fish fillets lurking in the freezer. 

The only recipe that didn't work so well as far as I'm concerned was the Black bean beef meatballs with stir fried noodles 

but then I hadn't clocked that the recipe only required 300g mince, and I kind of fiddled around and added in too many breadcrumbs so the end result was all a little dry.

Tomato & harissa stew with cheddar dumplings   

was also a great success - particularly the dumplings, which were pleasingly cheesy but not at all heavy and appeased the courgette haters amongst us... 

Yes, yes, spot the out of season courgette. So shoot me

The Beef & Bacon meatloaf - sneaky secret ingredient half a box of stuffing mix - was a huge hit too, destined to be a regular 'quick fix' on our menu, I think (in so far as anything turns up regularly)

Meatloaf worthy of a packed lunch

Blue forewent roast for school dinner the next day JUST so he could have meatloaf sandwiches with the left overs - praise indeed. The sausage & fennel meatballs with lentils made a delicious Saturday supper, and sausage & stuffing toad in the hole with onion gravy, using up the other half of the pack of stuffing from the meatloaf, was just the ticket on a wet and rainy Friday night.

So there you have it - these were all pretty quick to knock up and very easy. Apart from the Chinese meatballs, I would make everything again. I commend each and every one of these recipes to you, and say thank you, Good Food!

Sausage meatball pasta bake - the answer to bulk child feeding

You are so going to thank me for this.

On alternate Mondays, I have 4 hungry children to feed after school instead of the usual 2. I've mentioned before that it's a pretty quick turnaround as we're usually not back from school till just before 5, and then we have to be out again by 6.15 for Cubs. The food has to be easy, ready to go and crowd pleasing.

I actually made this for the post-Remembrance Sunday lunch, but we had to cancel as I succumbed to one of the many (or may be it's just one) nasty stomach bugs that's going round at the moment, and this was consigned to the freezer, along with the sausage and bean casserole that was the alternative dish, and the traybake Bakewell tart...

Pasta, meatballs, freezeable. I have yet to meet a child that doesn't like meatballs and you really can't have enough variations on them. This really is the answer to most post-school child feeding problems - certainly most of those that I am faced with. It started off as a John Torode recipe in a Good Food mag (September 2009 - a bumper issue as far as I'm concerned), but as is inevitable, has been tweaked to suit.

Sausage meatball pasta bake

Serves 6-8 mixed (and fairly hungry) adults & children 

150ml olive oil (I know - it sounds a lot, but you drain a lot of it off one way and another), 3 large onions, finely chopped, 2 garlic cloves finely chopped, 100g bread crumbs, or just mash up 100g worth of bread with a fork, 50ml milk, 500g beef mince, 500g sausage meat, 200ml red wine (or stock, if you haven't got any) 4 * 400g cans chopped tomatoes, 500g pasta - penne or macaroni is good, cheddar or other hard cheese to grate over.

Heat the oil in a large heavy based pan, and cook the onions and garlic, along with freshly ground salt and pepper, slowly, till they onions are soft but not coloured. Remove the onions using a slotted spoon, leaving as much oil as you can in the pan. Set aside half the onions and mix the other half in a large bowl with the breadcrumbs, milk, mince and sausage meat. Add in more salt and pepper if you want. If you do have some parsley available, you could add a good chopped handful in too. When everything is mixed together really well, shape into ping-pong ball sized meatballs.

Put a large pan of salted water on the stove, bring to the boil and cook the pasta.

While the pasta is cooking, put the pan with the oil in it (that's left from cooking onions) back on the heat and brown the meatballs in batches. As the meatballs are browned, remove to a plate lined with kitchen paper to absorb any excess oil. When all the meatballs are browned, put the reserved onions in the pan along with the wine/stock to scrape all the good bits off the bottom of the pan, then stir in 2 of the cans of tomatoes and the meatballs. Bring to a simmer and cook for 5-10 minutes. Drain the pasta then in the largest dish you can find, mix together the pasta and the meatballs and sauce. 

You can freeze the cooled dish at this stage - either as one massive dish or in portions as required. 

When you are ready to cook, pre-heat the oven to 180C. My dish looked a bit dry when I got it out of the freezer and defrosted it, which is where the extra cans of tomatoes come in, although you may decide you don't need it. The original recipe pours a white sauce over the pasta and meatballs, but Blue is no lover of white sauce, so I bubbled up the second 2 cans of tomatoes, tipped it over the pasta and meatballs, stirred it all together and grated some cheese on top. 

In the oven for 30 minutes = happy kids.   

Sort of summery meatballs - or how a slow cooker saved my life

Today, I have mostly won.

First thing, it had been lovely and sunny. I had a load of bedding that I had washed yesterday, sitting, damp, in the laundry basket. I went outside. I looked to all points of the compass. Not one single menacing dark cloud. Anywhere. I hung the washing out.

Later on, I had a hilarious conversation with a South African friend as we walked our dogs through the fields - hers taking every opportunity to sit in the muddiest of muddy puddles, mine buggering off into the wheat as soon as I stopped concentrating.

By the time we were half way across the fields, the clouds were gathering in again. I started my "Typical, just when I'd got the washing out" speech and she creased up. "You know, you are just so BRITISH" she roared with laughter. "I have sworn never to fall into this WAR with the weather that you have going on here. hang it up, take it in, always watching for the rain. Did you know my mother in law RINGS ME UP to tell me she got the washing dry outside?!?" I had to laugh, but there it is. That's me all over.

It's not just the washing - although that has been a particular issue recently. I mean, I don't want to go on about the weather, but it has been foul and we don't have a tumble dryer. So a day when it might not rain just galvanises me into action. "What can I wash?" I think. And on the touch and go days, I suffer angst about whether to put the washing out or not. Lucky that is all I have to suffer angst about these days, I know...

Anyway, I digress. I was talking about being at war - on the domestic front. May be 'war' is a strong word, but as the end of term approaches, I feel like every morning, I have to arm myself more carefully to face the day and the various challenges it is likely to offer.

I was feeling very pleased with myself last week having sorted out a mega-meal plan to get me through the rest of the month, part of my armour. It covers the end of term, and through to when we get back from Scout Camp. I finished it, posted it up on a linky, and felt organised. So short sighted.

check out the veg - all from the garden

 Last night, having served up a salad which, I am proud to say,  was almost exclusively from the garden (lettuce, spring onions, new potatoes, broad beans and eggs), I checked the menu plan for the meal for this evening. Meatballs. This would have been fine, but when I did the meal plan, it had been my intention to make them last night. However, at that point, when I consulted said plan, the meat was still in the freezer. I retrieved it anyway and started pondering how to make it work in the grand scheme of today which involved my usual working day, followed by picking the kids up at 4.30 and going straight to Pink's end of term 'ballet show' (something straight out of Joyce Grenfell, believe me!), not due to finish till 7, while the Husband would be back
and needing something to eat before heading off to Scouts
- at around 7. The timing was not looking good.

Salvation came in the form of the slow cooker - in fact, The Ultimate Slow Cooker which is a book I bought on the off chance through one of those Book People type things when Pink was at Playgroup. I'd been flicking through it the other day to work out how to do some gammon in the slow cooker, and I remembered that I'd seen a meatball recipe in there. Just the job. One of the things I love about slow cooking is that 'Everything is done" feeling, and today was a day where I needed that. That's not to say that you don't have to do all the prep etc, but it's done far enough away from the time you eat it that when you finally sit down to eat, you can forget that you were trying to make meatballs and packed lunches at the same time as listen to reading, take on board the Husband's schedule for the day and worry about whether anyone needed swimming kit....


Anyway, I made the meatballs up themselves this morning, and left them in the fridge while I took reckless pleasure in hanging out washing, putting a second load on (I know how to live dangerously), getting the kids to school, walking the dog and finally getting down to work. Then while I was grabbing a sandwich at lunchtime, I fried off the meatballs, made the sauce and put everything in the slow cooker to do their thang. Once we got in, it was a moment's work to cook some pasta, and bingo. Dinner.


I was particularly pleased with this meatball recipe that I made up (I used the book for sauce volume and cooking times). When I was chopping up the spring onions from the garden yesterday, I decided, on the back of the success of my garlic scape risotto, that I would use the spring onion tops instead of onion in the meatball recipe.




They took a bit of chopping up because they are kind of 'hollow', so when you slice you get a little green circle, and it needs to be quite small to go in the meatballs, but I treated them a little like herbs and used a mezza luna (one of those semi circular knives with a handles at each end that Nigella uses). 






Sort of Summery Meatballs

Ingredients:

For the meatballs - 400g lamb mince, a handful of spring onion tops - or a red onion, finely chopped, 1 clove of garlic, crushed, a slice of bread - a day or 2 old is good, a medium egg, salt and pepper, finely grated zest of a lemon

For the sauce - olive oil, 1 onion, finely chopped, 2 cloves of garlic, crushed, 1 can of chopped tomatoes, 200ml veg stock, salt and pepper and a pinch of sugar.

Method: to make the meatballs, put all the ingredients in a bowl, mash together with a fork until well combined and the bread is broken into crumbs throughout the mixture. You could make the bread into crumbs first in a food processor but I was short on time. Make into between 16 and 20 meatballs depending on the size you like them. I divided the mixture into 4 then into 4 again, then rolled each portion into a ball (with apologies for stating the obvious).

Set the slow cooker to heat up, splash some oil into a frying pan (I used a dessert spoon's worth), and brown the meatballs on quite a high heat. Set aside on kitchen paper, and then in the same pan, fry the onion & garlic till it is starting to soften, pour in the stock and tomatoes, scraping up all the good stuff from the bottom of the pan, add freshly ground salt and pepper and the sugar. Bring to the boil. While the sauce is coming to the boil, pop the meatballs in the slow cooker, then once the sauce is bubbling, pour it on top and replace the lid of the cooker. Cook on 'low' for 6-8 hours, and then serve with pasta - or rice or couscous...

Meatballs - revisited

Meatballs and I have history. Meatballs even lead to me actually getting paid to write something – how exciting was that? £25 for a ‘We Like to Eat’ column in the Guardian’s Family section last year. The handy link there (on 'history', if you didn't spot it!) takes you to a post I wrote in August last year, which is a longer version of that article. There was a time in my life when I had to make a particular lamb meatball recipe every day. Funnily enough, they have appeared less frequently on my menu subsequently. They are still a failsafe crowd pleaser, but the last couple of times I have made them, they haven’t been quite as good as I remembered.  However, a couple of weekends ago we were up at my mum’s and she served up meatballs made by mixing lamb mince and sausage meat. I don’t think I have ever come across a lamb/pork combination before, but it was really good. I think I prefer the lamb taste, but the addition of the sausage meat made them less dense.

Thus inspired, and using a Delia recipe (out of the Complete Cookery Course - meatballs braised with peppers and tomatoes - page 203 in my version!) as a rough guide for ingredient quantities, I have made meatballs this evening to feed the ravenous hoards (my turn to host the post- football/choir- pre-cubs play date).  In the interests of my own sanity, I chopped up all the veg, skinned the sausages and put veg, sausage meat and lamb mince in the fridge first thing this morning. I mixed, browned and cooked at lunchtime, and so I just need to cook spaghetti or other pasta and heat up the meatballs when it comes to tea time and the pack are baying at my heels demanding to be fed.

Sorry. Did I just liken my kids and their friends to a pack of animals there? Whoops.

Mediterranean style meatballs with hidden veg

Meatballs: 400g lamb mince, 6 pork sausages, 1 red onion, 1 red pepper, Handful of coriander leaves and stalks, 1 clove of garlic, 2 slices of bread, Salt and pepper, grated zest of a lemon

Sauce:  1 red onion & 1 clove of garlic, finely chopped, 2 cans of chopped tomatoes, 2 tsps Marigold stock powder.

Method: For the meatballs, finely chop the onion, pepper, coriander and garlic – I used a food processor to be honest. In a bowl, using a fork, (or again, using a food processor) mash up the bread into crumbs, then squeeze the meat out of the sausage skins, add the lamb mince and the chopped veg, add the egg, salt and pepper and lemon zest and mix together thoroughly. Form the mixture into meatballs.

Basically you can make them whatever size you want – depending on the size of the mouths you are feeding. I made just over 30 out of this amount which i am hoping confidently predict will feed 2 adults and 4 children.

Once you have formed the meatballs, you need to brown them in batches - heat a tablespoon or so of oil in a pan and put the meatballs in so the pan isn't overcrowded. Cook for a good couple of minutes on one side before turning to brown the rest (if you try to turn them too early, they will stick. i do it all the time) and then remove from the pan once brown and set aside.

It would be a good idea to drain them on kitchen paper if you have it to hand (I didn’t today), while you make the sauce.

For the Sauce: heat a tablespoon of oil in a large casserole and add the onion and garlic. Fry for a few minutes, then add in the cans of tomatoes. Put the stock powder into one of the cans, and fill with boiling/hot water. Tip the water into the second can (to get all the leftover tomato stuff out) and then tip into the casserole. Add some salt and pepper and bring to the boil. Bubble for 10 mins or so, then add in the browned meatballs. Turn the heat down to a simmer, put the lid on and cook gently for 25-30 mins.

Serve with pasta - I usually cook about 50 g per child and 100g per adult - anything left over goes into Pink's lunch box the following day - and today we're having green beans.

Meatballs - a recipe for life?

It’s very wet and miserable in this part of West Yorkshire today. We’ve been to the cinema (Cars 2)and played pick-up sticks, and now we’re trying to do some more work on the holiday scrapbooks that the children were sent home with. In fairness, it’s blue who has been asked to do the scrapbook, but pink is doing one too so she doesn’t feel left out. As the holiday has progressed, the enthusiasm to update the scrapbook has waned, to the point where we’ve been at mum’s since Monday and haven’t done anything on the scrapbook since last week – and all we did last week was to put in the photos from the holiday with a few captions. Suffice to say that it’s like pulling teeth so I am sitting next to the poor boy trying not to sound exasperated as he laboriously writes about trying to push the trolley through to Platform 9 3/4 , and am thinking about all I want to write about meatballs.

Allotment Junkie made these for supper last night – made in advance they are a great freezer meal  - but after a day of revisiting old haunts in York from my Law Student days, these meatballs took me back to a more recent, and certainly more sober, period.

Picture if you will, a fairly hectic household – 2 working parents, 2 yr old and a baby on the way. Blue was in nursery 4 days a week as husband and I rushed around earning money. Definitely time poor, and suffering massively from maternal guilt I spent a lot of time trying to fill the freezer with wholesome food so that at least on one level I could feel like I was doing something right by my son. These meatballs were a huge hit, and I felt very smug that blue would eat them in huge quantities. Pride inevitably comes before a fall, especially when feeding small children, but I could never have anticipated how these meatballs (from a Good Food magazine – Moroccan Lamb meatballs, I think they were called) would come to haunt me.  

February 2006, and one morning, blue had a fall down the step into the kitchen and began to have problems walking. Then there was a strange day when nursery called me to say that something was obviously distressing him but they couldn’t work out what it was. He began to show reluctance walking to the point where he refused altogether, although when off his feet he seemed fine. He was having some extremely long nosebleeds.  3 visits to a GP and we were referred to an orthopaedic surgeon. Fortunately, at the time, we were in a position to go privately and were fitted in very conveniently the next evening. The consultant was about our age. As all consultants should, he exuded confidence. His manner told us that he would, without a doubt, be able to tell us what was ailing our small son. 90 minutes later, he could not tell us what was ailing our small son and he referred us to the paediatric department of the local hospital. His secretary completed the referral letter that night and phoned me the next day to say that she had faxed it off. It was a Wednesday. By Thursday morning I was ringing the hospital every 30 minutes until they had given us an appointment for the next Monday.

That Monday came, and unusually, blue was not awake when our alarm went off. I had planned to go to work as usual and pick him up from nursery at lunchtime  – in himself he still seemed fine – but by 7.30 he was still in bed so I went into him. Blood everywhere – he was having a catastrophic nosebleed. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre might have taken place in his bed. It took an hour to stop the bleeding and it was clear that he was, all of a sudden, very, very poorly. If I hadn’t had the appointment already arranged I would probably have gone to A&E then and there, but I didn’t. I’ll spare you the details of the hospital appointment. In fact we were there all afternoon. However, at about 7 p.m. we were the only people in the department, and the consultant took us into another room and told us that he had Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia and our world exploded.

 After a nightmare 2 weeks in hospital, we were home and subject to an exhausting schedule of chemotherapy and blood tests. When we weren’t in hospital for treatment we were waiting for the community nurses to come out to do blood tests, or worrying about whether his immune system was down and whether the temperature that appears to be coming on would mean another 48 hours in hospital on intravenous antibiotics while they worked out if it was just a virus or a bacterial infection causing the temp. As if the treatment itself wasn’t bad enough, there were the side-effects to cope with too. In particular, the steroids that accompanied the chemotherapy made him constantly ravenous, and craving in a way that made my pregnancy desire for goats cheese (I was 6 months pregnant when he was diagnosed) look silly. He would wake hungry at 6 a.m. and eat until about 2.30 in the afternoon, when he would have a little break, and then start again around 4 in the afternoon until bedtime. Kilos of Shreddies, cheddar cheese (extra mature), cherry tomatoes, cocktail sausages – and these meatballs. His first words in the morning would often be “I’m feeling like meatballs today”, and he meant it. As cooking was practically one of the only things I could do for him in those first dreadful months of the disease, I cooked them.

The ingredients are straightforward:  500g lamb mince, 1 finely chopped onion, 1 clove of garlic, 1tsp each ground cumin, coriander and paprika, 400g chopped tomatoes, 300 ml veg stock, Lemon zest, Fresh coriander

There are many better things to be doing at 6.30 on a Sunday morning than frying onions with the  garlic, cumin paprika and coriander. But fry I did.  Once fried and cooled, half the onions are mixed with the mince and then formed into balls. The meatballs are then browned and set aside, then in the same pan, add the remaining onion mix, the chopped tomatoes and stock. Bring to the boil, return the meatballs to the pan and simmer for 30 minutes.  The original recipe required the meatballs to be served with couscous, garnished with lemon zest and chopped fresh coriander, but the cravings for pasta proved too strong, so they were served with spaghetti.

I must have made thousands of these over the course of his treatment. The local butcher got used to seeing me loitering as he opened up and started to keep a stash of lamb mince aside for me. When he was in the deepest grip of the steroids, I once used up 3lbs of mince in a weekend – all for him.

Blue has been off treatment and in remission for over 2 years and should get a qualified 'all clear' next June. I don’t make these so often these days – I have discovered other meatball recipes, and thankfully, despite my worries that the limited diet he had tolerated during his treatment would leave him fussy and picky about his food, once he was off chemo his diet broadened out considerably. It was as if after 3 years of most things tasting awful, a whole new world of food had opened up to him. But these meatballs served a huge purpose and I will always be grateful to them. After having them again yesterday, maybe I will cook them a bit more...