Cooking With Ricochet: How To Make Rissoles

Serves about 4 (depending on how big of an eater each person is)

Ingredients
500-700 grams minced meat* (usually beef or lamb or veal, whatever you prefer)
2 or 3 tablespoons of tomato paste (puree)
1 large onion
1 teaspoon of oregano (or as much as you like)
1 teaspoon of sweet Hungarian paprika (once again, you like paprika, go nuts)
Milk
Plain Flour
Eggs (at least 6)
Breadcrumbs

Potatoes (enough to make mashed potato for everyone - I dunno, 6 large 'tatoes)

Steps

1. Go home for the weekend to see your family and get roped into making dinner.
2. Take the minced meat and stick it in a mixing bowl with the tomato paste, the chopped up onion, the sweet Hungarian paprika and oregano. Start squishing it all together with your hands in a gross, glorious, squidgy mess.
3. Find out that the refrigerator system at the supermarket was a little overenthusiastic and that the mince is actually semi-frozen when you start losing the sensation in your fingertips.
4. When your mobile phone starts ringing in your jeans pocket, run into the lounge room and scare the bejesus out of your sister by jumping up and down and jiggling your hip at her and yelling that you can’t answer the phone because your hands are covered in meat.
5. Roll your eyes when, once she has fished out your mobile phone and answered it, you discover that it’s your mother calling to check that you still remember where everything is in the cupboard. From the other end of the house.
6. Take four large pasta bowls. Half fill each of them: one with milk, one with plain flour, one with egg and one with breadcrumbs.
7. Roll a ball of mincey-meaty-onion-tomato stuff up into the size of an egg and squish it flat. Then dip it in the milk, roll it in the flour, dip it in the egg, roll it in the breadcrumbs and put it on a large plate to await cooking.
8. This will take a while and you will have to have another plate on standby to scrape accumulated milky, floury, eggy, breadcrumby goop off your fingers onto.
9. As you are scraping crap off your hands yell at your sister that what she really really wants to do is peel the potatoes and stick them in a microwave safe casserole dish and nuke them for about ten minutes and then mash them with a bit of milk, margarine and salt.
10. She will disagree but you will be very convincing. She will be very convinced that she doesn’t want milky, floury, eggy, breadcrumby fingers wiped all over her nice shirt.
11. Once you’ve finished rolling and dipping and scraping, wash all the gunk off your hands, pour an oil of your choice (canola, vegetable, olive… whatever gloopily floats your boat) into a frypan and start frying rissoles at a sort of medium high temperature (I dunno) until they’re golden brown on the outside and cooked on the inside. About 2 minutes each side should do it.
12. Serve with plenty of mashed potato, tomato sauce** and pointed comments along the line of how nice it is to come home and see everyone and be given the opportunity to refamiliarise yourself with the family kitchen. Mouths will be too full to allow verbal ripostes so expect the 'talky talky' hand signal and grins.
    
    

*possibly known as ground chuck elsewhere in the multiverse (Who is Chuck and what did he do to you?) - Oh and 500 - 700 grams is about 1.1 to 1.5 pounds

**ketchup, catsup, tomato relish, whatever.