Good morning. There are some nights when all I want to eat for dinner is super-crisp chicken wings with ranch dressing, or hot dogs loaded with chopped pickles and streaked with crema and hot sauce. They’re usually Wednesday nights when I want a break from cooking, but don’t want to deal with the invariable disappointment of delivery food.
And now I’ve got a new meal to add to the Wednesday ledger: meatball subs (above) in all their cheesy, crispy, saucy magnificence. The recipe employs a neat trick where you scrape out the hero rolls to make bread crumbs for the meatball mix, leaving behind bread canoes for serving the sandwiches. Nice! (Alternate meatball situation: these chicken Parm ones Kay Chun developed.)
Not that I always cook off the sports-bar menu on Wednesday nights. I might make sweet potatoes with tahini butter and call it a night, or roasted mushrooms covered in a Memphis dry rub. I might make pork chops in cherry-pepper sauce, serve them with spaghetti dressed with only butter and Parmesan.
Suvir Saran gave us a marvelous recipe for palak ki tiki, spinach and potato patties that can be used for a tremendous vegetarian burgers, great with tamarind chutney and cucumber-flecked yogurt. That would be a fine Wednesday night meal.