The PolyBlog

As part of my 60×60 goals, I’m trying out a bunch of new recipes, and some of them are not going to be giant successes. I pulled one from “Air Fryer Meals in Minutes” by Elizabeth Caroline, and while it was okay, I got some of the quantities wrong, and the result was okay but not promising enough to be worthwhile correcting in the future.

The recipe basically called for a medium onion, minced. I didn’t feel like completely mincing everything, so I went with very fine dicing with some left over chunks, but I should have used the chopper. In addition, I used a medium-large onion, instead of a medium onion, and the quantity of onion to everything else was way off. I should have cut the quantity in half, but didn’t figure it would make enough difference, and I had no use for the extra onion in the immediate future. Another mistake.

I found it interesting that the recipe had me air-fry the onion and garlic together first; most of the AF recipes are one-shot deals so far. Anyway, you air fry it and then mix it in a big bowl with bread crumbs, milk, marjoram, basil and ground beef.

Because of the two onion errors — not chopping finely aka mincing and not eliminating what appeared to be too much quantity — I had trouble getting the meatballs to form properly. Too many large pieces sticking out, and more onions than I needed. I could have upped the quantity of meat to alter the balance, but it wouldn’t have corrected the size of the onions.

It worked, they tasted fine, or as Jacob decreed, “They’re not terrible.” But even with the right onion amounts and sizing, the taste wasn’t anything special. Which isn’t surprising…meat, two spices, onions, and garlic aren’t likely going to wow me. It was an easy recipe, and air-frying the meatballs was a new way to make them over baking, but in the end, there are better meatball recipes out there to try. I have a pic below of the bowl before making the meatballs, and you can see there is too much onion. As I said, we could have added more meat to alter the balance, but instead we’re going to mix it with more meat, add some taco seasoning, and use it as filling for fajitas later this week.