Benin: Chicken Meatballs with Red Sauce

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED.

This recipe took me the better part of a a day to make. Partly because I'm a slow chopper and partly because I'm a big believer in mise en place. This means I like to have everything organized and prepped before I begin the actual cooking. It ensures I have all of the ingredients ready to go, in whatever form they need to be in, so the process goes as smoothly as possible with no hurried dicing of vegetables or digging around my cupboards for that one spice I'm pretty sure I have but haven't laid eyes on recently.

So in order to mise en place this recipe I had to do several things before I got to the cooking part.

I had to blanch, peel, and deseed six tomatoes. I'd never blanched anything before but it turned out to be not that difficult. The deseeding part was messy but I got through it. Once blanched, peeled, and deseeded, I then had to dice all six tomatoes.

I also had to dice up four onions, one pepper, and a bunch of green onions. Our grocery store gets onions that are BIG, like the size of a softball or a baby's head. Once I'd chopped up four large (baby's head sized) onions, I had a MOUNTAIN of diced onions. At the point, I thought other people were probably using normal sized onions and I decreased the amount of onions by about 2½ cups (which I set aside for a soup I'll be making in a couple of days.)

I still had plenty of onions for this meal! So, you should probably use 4 medium sized onions for this recipe.

And then came the part where I had to make my own ground chicken for the meatballs. Something else I'd never done before! The recipe calls for one whole chicken, skinned, deboned, and cut up but I had about a pound each of boneless skinless thighs and boneless skinless chicken breasts on hand already. So, I roughly chopped them up and put them in the food processor (with other ingredients, as per the recipe). Luckily, the blend came out very flavorful and didn't dry out like ground all white meat chicken tends to do.

All of that took me awhile, but when it came time to assemble and cook, all the prep work had been done, and all of the dishes/messes created by the prep work were done too.

Was the meal worth all that time and mess?

YES! It made a lot of delicious food. I have leftovers that I'm looking forward to reheating for dinner tonight. Would I make it again? Yes!