check out my 22 inch panhandle, and balls

It seems a bit remiss of me not to have done a recipe post since moving to the lavishly appointed kitchen surroundings of the new Halibut Towers back in June (the haggis sausages - haggisauges? - don't count as we were in Scotland at the time). It's very nice to have a kitchen you can get a television and a table and chairs in and mill around in casually while cooking, rather than the cramped single-file galley arrangement with the ever-present threat of staving your skull in on either the doorway or the light fittings.

That said, this isn't actually a new recipe post, so I've sort of lured you in here under false pretences. Sorry about that. Stick around, though. No, what I did this afternoon was make another big batch of meatballs according to this still unimproved-upon recipe. Now the mildly tedious bit of this recipe is the browning of the meatballs before introducing them to the sauce, a normal-sized frying pan will take 6-8 at a time so you're looking at up to eight separate batches, which gets a bit tedious, not to mention smoky. So I decided this was the perfect time to road-test (all right, stove-test) the bigger of the two paella pans I acquired last Christmas. The smaller one makes a decent-sized paella for four, but this one is twice the diameter (a whopping 22 inches), and therefore four times the area. So it should be ideal for a jumbo batch of meatballs. Also, our new kitchen has a halogen hob, so I theorised that I could just plonk the pan on it, switch all the rings on at once, and Bob's your uncle.


Sure enough, the pan turns out to be perfect for a full 2.5-kilo batch of meatball mix (I think there are about 50 meatballs here - feel free to count and tell me if you like).


The only drawback with doing it this way is that it becomes a bit difficult keeping track of which balls need turning, and which ones you've just done, especially as the four-rings-at-once approach means the heat distribution is a bit uneven. All in all it works pretty well, though. Now I just need to find enough freezer space to accommodate 10 portions of meatballs, or my diet for the next week or so is going to be (while delicious) a bit monotonous.