When life gives you balls, make meatballs

Dear Mom,

Thank you for making meatballs more than once.

Cordially,
Me

I made meatballs today, and holy crap was that ever a lousy idea. It's tedious, time-consuming, icky, sticky, and burny. Well, I didn't actually burn myself, but I could have! THE DANGER IS REAL.

The recipe I found on the internet called for two pounds of ground beef. Yes, I consulted the internet on how to make balls of meat because like so many things, I imagined there would be a secret ingredient. In this case, there were two: bread crumbs (really?) and eggs (who knew?). Two pounds of ground beef didn't seem like a lot when I was at the supermarket, but apparently two pounds of ground beef makes A MILLION MEATBALLS. Which would be great, except I had to create them individually; my manservant Alexander had the afternoon off. After an hour of making balls of raw meat -- I probably could have saved time by not taking breaks for despair -- came the fun part: frying!

I love cooking, but one thing that continues to annoy me about the whole thing is the uncertainty of meat, specifically the possibility that "tasty looking on the outside" might mean "uncoooked on the inside." What I need is a small camera, like the kind they use in surgery, to stick into meat so I can see if it's cooked on the inside. Also, if there were a microscopic zoom on it so I could tell if there's salmonella or E.coli or ... y'know ... fecal matter ... well, I'd pay up to $15 more for such a feature. Get on it, Ronco!

If you judge success by how little you throw up from undercooked meat, then the frying was successful. Which is a shame, really, because the triumph of making meatballs was overshadowed by the anticlimax of an uninspired tomato sauce. How can anticlimax overshadow anything? Isn't it the very nature of anticlimax to be underwhelming? And why haven't I learned to make good tomato sauce yet? These and other questions will be answered in our exciting conclusion: "Alone Against the Butchers' Brigade!"