Porcupine Roadkill

I LOVE my mom's porcupines.  Big ground beef and rice meatballs simmered in tomato sauce and rice, it's one of those things that tastes better the next day.

Make some meatballs of ground beef, minute rice, an egg, garlic, and oregano.  My mom always made them pretty big, but I never quite got the hang of frying the big ones so that the center was done and the outside wasn't burnt, so I just make smaller ones.  Someday I will master the (small) fist-sized meatball.  When they are cooked through, put some tomato sauce, garlic, oregano, water, and rice in the pan and simmer it all together until the rice is done.

Of course, sometimes you want a porcupine after a long day of work.  You could simply plan ahead and have some frozen meatballs ready to go in a pan with tomato sauce and rice, but that would be too easy!  So some nights I make porcupine roadkill.

Here we have some pearl rice, crushed tomatoes, dried whole oregano (if your herbs don't smell, they won't taste!), and some leftover tomato soup.  After browning the ground beef with some garlic, I added the whole lot plus some water.  Well, not all of the oregano.  Just two small palm fulls.

After it simmered over low heat for awhile, the rice was done, and I got my porcupine fix.

This is a play on depression era food.  You would have used rice to stretch out the meat, you would have grown some oregano and maybe garlic or even left them out completely (still tasty by the way), and probably used tomato soup, or whatever tomato product you could find.  Maybe even some tomatoes from the garden.