Feta and Fennel Meatballs

My wife made a large batch of meatballs the other day and they were heavenly. I made her write the recipe down to share with the world, but of course she claims that she can't be held accountable for the exact instructions. My response, "Please, woman, as if I ever know exactly how I made something."

Meatballs are a wonderful thing to freeze and have on lots of dishes. Have some marinara sauce made already then whipping up some sandwiches or pasta takes no time at all. Having little things like this around in our fridge is great for the busy family and you will never taste anything like them from a store bought frozen aisle.

Prep Time: 10 min
Cook Time: 10 min
Number of Servings: None

Ingredients

• 2 lb beef ground
• 4 slices bread whole wheat
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp fajita seasoning
• 1-2 tsp crushed red pepper
• 1-2 tsp fennel seeds
• 1/4 cup feta cheese
• 2 tbsp cooking oil

Preparation

Tear the bread into small pieces and stir with milk and eggs until consistent mixture. Mix the rest of the ingredients and gently mix with the ground beef. Form the meatballs to the desired size make sure not to compact them too tightly.

In a skillet, heat oil until its hot enough to pop when a drop of water is added. Fry each side of the meatballs for about 5 minutes. Serve what you need and freeze the rest. With golf ball size meatballs makes about two dozen.

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Google Custom Search

I've finally created my Food Blog Search Engine with google custom search. The link up a the top of my page titled "search links" will take you to it. I've taken the 1800 links from foodblog blog, a site that more or less seems defunct, and put them into sites searched by the custom search engine. I've also added these sites to my list of links, which I'm sure I'll get around to adding to the site at some point (other than the blogroll at the bottom).

Why is this a good thing? Well for one it makes it so that the recipes I get when searching only come from blogs rather than these large databases like cooks.com or about.com. Don't get me wrong, I love these sites but I find much more interesting things in the blogs I read. Although it might be more relevant, I never see food blog in a search engine when I search for food.

If you end up using it let me know, also if you want to add your site to the list let me know. At some point I will probably set it up so people can do so automatically but for now just leave a comment.

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New and Improved

I've been putting in a lot of needed changes to the site lately. Well, to tell you the truth, I'm really avoiding working on my dissertation and have been wanting to do a lot of different things with the site, so why not now. First I've added the comment system back, now with reCAPTCHA. Now not only will my site be protected from bots, like that stupid one that posted 100 comments/hour, but commenters will also help translate old books. reCAPTCHA is a great bit of software, simple to set up and a worthy cause, I recommend it to everyone.

The second thing to change is the uris, now based on the entry title and date instead of the database index number. I did this to help keep uris stable in the future even if they have to be "uncool" for now. Most people won't notice but there might be some broken links because of it.

Finally I updated the sitemap, but that really is only useful for Google. Anywho I hope the site keeps improving but I don't know when I will get to work on it more. Heck I hardly have the time to make sure I get the recipes put in correctly.

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