Ladies and Gentlemen, the Amazing Spaghetti Bomb!

So as previously promised, part 2 of this morning's blog

When I last left you, I was given an odd and almost impossible request from Joey D. When asked what he wanted for his birthday dinner, a mischievous grin crossed his face. Then his hands went up. When he answers a question with a description involving hand gestures, you know its going to be interesting and most likely ridiculous!  The next words out of his mouth were "Can you make a giant meatball filled with spaghetti?" He stumped me. This doesnt happen often. I thought for a minute and said "Uh... sure? Im sure its possible." So I spent the remainder of the day finding ways to make this happen. Of course, its the ONLY time that when researched on the interwebs, I found nothing!! I found a meat bowl but nothing even close to this.

In the meantime I started on the banana Boston cream pie. It was pretty simple. It helps to have a shiny red race car KitchenAid mixer. Its a Professional 5 Plus. This means it weighs more than Sadie and sounds like an outboard motor. Since I have no counter space, I have to keep it on a shelf and lug it to the table every time I use it. Its totally worth it, though. I get quite a workout. I am starting to see some real Popeye forearm muscle (pronounced mus-kle) def-kinition. Im becoming quite the badass!

So I made the pastry cream and then the cake. I love making cakes from scratch. Mainly because they require baking powder. Dont know why but I like baking powder. Maybe its because it is so close to home. No matter where in the world I go, I will always find a little piece of the Haute. See:

The cake went very well. Even though my mixer was too big to beat the two egg whites so I had to beat them to soft peaks by hand. I felt like my arm would fall off.

I did have an assistant but to be honest, she wasnt much help. Good help is hard to come by. My assistant spent a lot of time sitting around watching me, sampling the product, pointing fingers, and although I feel she may be unqualified to do so, barking orders and telling me what to do:

 

Much like my cousin, Lindsay's adorable assistant, mine also has an issue with drinking on the job.

In spite of the tremendous pressure and lack of help from my little munchkin helper, the cake turned out to be WONDERFUL. More on that later but now back to the meaty dilemma at hand:

I realized that to make a whole meat sphere would be next to impossible, both gravitationally speaking and in terms of quality. It would make the spaghetti all gross and greasy. So after long deliberation, I decided a spaghetti bomb would be the way to go. It all started with the meat bowl. So I went about the business of making the meatball mixture that I would typically use. It included a ground beef, pork, and veal mixture. I sauteed onions and mixed garlic in olive oil. Then added some red wine and worcestershire sauce. While I was cooking this delicious mixture Joe came into the kitchen and said "mmm... that smells awesome! What is it?" I was reluctant to answer because I knew it would gross him out. But I told him and his face twisted. So then I had a brilliant idea. I got out the baby food grinder and pureed the delicious onion and garlic mixture. This is what it looked like:

Soooo tasty! Smelled amazing and as it turns out, was a great binding agent. Next we added seasoning and bread crumbs... LOTS of breadcrumbs, some eggs, some milk, bada boom bada bing, we have a meaty concoction that was sure to be delicious. Since I HATE mixing meat with my hands and they are all cracked and painful from cleaning and washing my hands a bazillion times a day, Mr. Birthday Boy, himself, pitched in. He gets some sort of strange satisfaction out of mixing meat by hand. Perhaps something that should be examined in therapy or personal reflection, but who am I to make that call?

Then I had a crazy notion to smoosh the meat mixture up the sides of a stainless steel mixing bowl and bake. This was actually quite an icky feeling and looking situation! Thanks to Jersey Shore, I am now alarmingly aware of the fact that I used the words "smoosh" and "situation" in this paragraph. 

Baked it for a while... I had no frame of reference so I crossed my fingers, set the oven to 375 and eyeballed it. I did put another nesting bowl in the middle and weighted it so there wouldnt be any shrinkage and thickening. Lord knows shrinkage is never good. So when it was done this is what we got:

Hard to see the difference but it is cooked... It actually looked like a school cafeteria hamburger, only in the shape of a bowl. So I drained the juice, splashed in a layer of spaghetti sauce and stuffed it with this delicious spaghetti, ricotta, mozzarella, sauce mixture which I did not photograph because by this time, I was starting to get nervous and felt a little under the gun. But know that this was an interesting sight. I put it back into the oven for a while. After a while... I cant give you specific times because I dont remember... I took it out and CAREFULLY flipped it upside down onto a foil lined pizza pan. It was the only thing I could think of that would accommodate this monster without leaking out all of the juices that seemed to be pouring out at an alarming rate.

Then I took this beast out, gave it a sprinkling of cheese and called the troops in to test this monster:

It didnt look pretty but considering the fact that it was the maiden voyage, I think we did pretty well! No breaking. Some light spillage out of the bottom and some sloppy sauce application but all in all it was successful. It was cooked through, it smelled delicious. It was time to cut it:

Looks terrifying, doesnt it? 

And now the plating test:

We used the fine china ;-) The pattern is called Dixie. It was passed down to me by my mother. LOL! Actually, the use of paper plates, although not the best selection for spaghetti, was per Maddy's request. This culinary adventure made a lot of dishes for her to wash. I figured I would oblige.

The taste test? It was unanimously a huge success! Everyone LOVED it! It was AWESOME!! We all ate ourselves silly!

Then came the singing of Happy Birthday and CAKE!
I tried to take what I thought was the easy route and use a tube of Betty Crocker decorating icing... I almost had an aneurysm trying to squeeze that stuff out. So it may look like an ape wrote on the cake, at least I used proper punctuation. *score one for me! And of course, Joey shouted the obligatory "I WANT MY NAME!"

In our house, the birthday boy/girl has to wear two hats. Joey D is no different! I thought it looked smashing on him. (Although, Maddy did call him out for looking like "Tit Head" from Little Nicky sooooo... thanks for making me feel like a bad mom for letting you watch a highly inappropriate movie and then associating a completely innocent fashion statement with a demon who happens to have a bra-clad pair of knockers on his head. AWESOME!)

So boys and girls, there you have it... the story of the spaghetti bomb aka meatcano. Thank you for going on this journey with me. I appreciate you hanging in there. I know it got a little hairy there in the middle. And I also appreciate that you still read on even though Im obviously not into the whole brevity thing! So I leave you with this though... If you will it, Dude, it is no dream! Happy birthday Mr. Joey D!!