Is it possible to make to many meatball based dishes in one week? Yes, yes it is. By the time that I made the Moroccan Beef Meatball Tagine on friday, I was getting a bit tired of making meat balls. Shannon helped make the meatballs for the Spaghetti, since I was running behind and needed to start making the sauce.

This week I also used many pots pans and dishes, so I kept falling further and further behind as the week went on. On Friday, which I took off, I ended up doing 4 loads of dishes before I was caught up.

Lentil Soup with Spicy Italian Sausage (p43 Bon Appétit January 2010)

This was very simple to make, with the spicy Graziano sausage it made for a good and filling meal.

Pork Meatball Banh Mi (p60 Bon Appétit January 2010)

The first meatball dish of the week. I uh...kept eating the meatballs as I was making the rest of the dinner. They were very good. But the dinner was too.

Spiced Chicken Breasts with Poblano and Bell Pepper Rajas (p45 Bon Appétit January 2010)

Whenever I have done something with poblano peppers it always reminds me of a smell that I haven't smelled for a while. Maybe it just trigger to me, but when Sean roasts them at the Farmer's Market or I've cooked them myself, It brings up that thought in my mind. Who knows, maybe it's just me.

Anyways I ended up slicing up the chicken and we had a few fajitas.

Spaghetti and Meatballs All'Amatriciana (p60 Bon Appétit January 2010)

I made this for movie night (we watched The Wild Bunch)Shannon helped me make the meat balls, and after having the first batch of meat balls kind of fall apart as I tried to turn them (the pot I was cooking is is fairly tall and narrow), I ended up putting the rest of them in the oven, while I cooked everything else. This actually turned out fairly well.

Other then being pressed for time, this turned out pretty well. I used a bottle of wine that we had gotten on our honeymoon at a demonstration we went to, since I was almost out of white wines and the only ones left were of the sweeter variety. So pasta, plus bread, white corn, and a simple spinach salad with a rice vinegar based dressing made for quite the feast.

Because of the way I made this, I thought that perhaps the meat combination would make a good hamburger. Bacon + onion, red pepper, etc all processed and mixed into ground chuck. I will probably be making this sometime later.

Moroccan Beef Meatball Tagine (p63 Bon Appétit January 2010)

This was good and tasty, but by this point in the week, I think we were both a little meatballed out. But it still turned out

Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza (p15 Cook's Illustrated January/February 2010)

So I have kind of avoided making bread based things...There are two great bakeries within a fairly short distance from my house, so it's just never something that I have been dreadfully interested in trying. Plus there is sort of a mysticism to it, I suppose. There is so much mediocre bread out there, that you would think creating something halfway decent would be super hard...I think with my experience here, I think I can move forward a bit and expand bread making to the list of things I do from time to time.

So because I was worried about time, I starting making the dough for the pizza around 1:PM Saturday, it was probably a good thing, since we generally keep the house around 67°F, and because of the, lets say relatively poor insulation, it isn't that way from area to area. So I let the dough get extra time to rise (it didn't hurt that I spent the time playing Super Mario Bros Wii). All the parts were relatively simple and when it came down to it, this was relatively easy to do, just time consuming.

I adjusted the recipe, since it really was only a cheese pizza when I started. I layered the pizza with: dough, Pepperoni, mozzarella, pepperoni, mozzarella, pepperoni, sharp cheddar, sauce, and parmesan. It turned out quite well, and everyone seemed to enjoy it (we had invited Josh and Lindsay over). Of the two 9" pizzas we had about 1/2 of one left. I was quite happy with the way it turned out.