More balls: potatoes, meat and veg.

Us Dutch, we love our "AVG" - aardappels, groente, vlees. Basically meat and two veg, but of one those 'veggies' is always potatoes which, for some reason, deserves a whole food group of its own. 

The potatoes are usually boiled, as are the vegetables, the meat is usually fried or stewed. Meat balls in various forms (including blind finches - a tubular version with bacon around it, let's not go in to that), pork chops, sausages, steaks, pork or beef stew... there's a lot of options, but a good old fashioned Dutch "grandma style" meat ball is my favorite. 

Serve it with the gravy and steamed or cooked, unpeeled but wel scrubbed new potatoes and steamed vegetables. It doesn't always have to be fancy. 

Ingredients

• 300 grams of good quality minced beef 
• 4 strips of bacon, fried and finely chopped (or use half beef/half pork mince)
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 garlic clove, very finely chopped
• 1 tsp stew seasoning (coriander seeds, foil, nutmeg, paprika, allspice, pepper)
• 1 small egg
• panko or other coarse bread crumbs
• 1 tsp milk powder
• 1 tsp mustard
• 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp Tabasco
• 3g salt
• Flour,all purpose

Gravy:

• 3 onions, chopped
• 1 tsp thyme
• 1 tsp soy sauce
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tsp concentrated tomato paste
• 1 tbsp chicken stock (concentrated, or use regular stock instead of the water)
• water

Preparation

Fry the onion, bacon and garlic until done, let cool and mix with the rest of the ingredients. Add enough panko to make a ball that is neither too dry nor too wet. Roll 4 balls, roll them through flour to coat and brown them in a lot of butter, then remove the balls from the pan.

Fry the onions in the butter until golden brown. Add the rest of the ingredients. Put the balls in and add water (or stock) until they are 2/3 covered. Cook the balls on low heat for about 30 minutes, turning them halfway through. Remove the balls and the bay leaf and thicken the gravy with some cornflour if necessary.

Serve with a craft lager or Weizen.