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If you’ve gone gluten-free, certain things can be a little bit more difficult to make. Anything that relies on gluten for elasticity, or for filling, or for thickening, will be either un-elastic, less filled, or less thick. There are always workarounds, of course; for meatballs I’ve found one of the best ways to add filler is to add rice. I mean “filler” in the best sense of the word, as 100% meatballs can be more than a little bit too much for most people. And remember, rice is cheaper than… everything.

So to begin you’re going to want to have some ingredients:

Meatball:
1 lb, lean ground beef
1/2 cup, uncooked rice
1/8 cup, potato flour
1/8 cup, rice flour
1/4 cup, onion, finely chopped
2 eggs
2 tsp, salt
1 tsp, pepper
2 tsp, garlic (optional)
2 tsp, chilli powder (optional)

Sauce:
1 big can, pasta sauce
1 big can, diced tomatoes

You’ll want to get all this stuff together before you start. Don’t be the person measuring stuff really quickly and spilling all over the kitchen because you didn’t measure it all out first. Make sure you chop the onion up nice and fine: You don’t want to chomp into a beautiful round meatball and come up with a nauseatingly large chunk of onion. Also, wash your rice. I don’t know why; no-one does. Just do it.

I’m going to be honest here: Doing this by hand is all fine and well for that authentic feeling, especially if you like kneading meet and feeling it squish out from between your fingers like the guts of some long-dead alien creature, but it’s way, way easier to just throw it all into a food processor and let the thing do it’s job. Start with the eggs, flour, and spices. Throw the meat on top of that, and the onions on top of that. Let fly.

Now at this point you’re going to be asking me some questions. For instance, why the extra egg? I know, I know, most recipes you find will only have one egg. In a meatball the egg basically functions as a binding agent, helping the ball of meat to be a ball of meat instead of a bunch of meat in a pan. It gives the meatball a bit of texture as well. In a Normal People recipe, you’ve got other agents to help do that, like maybe wheat flour or bread crumbs or something. These meatballs, on the other hand, need all the help they can get. Which leads me to: What’s with the sauce? Well, these meatballs have uncooked rice in them. They’re not the sort of meatballs that you throw in the oven. You’re going to need a saucepan. I suppose it’s theoretically possible to make them in an oven with pre-cooked rice, but I’ve never done that. You’re welcome to try.

Here comes the fun part: After your meatball mix is all ready to roll, you’ll want to crack open those cans of tomatoes and toss them into a saucepan. If you’re using super-lean ground beef, you’ll probably want to throw in a dash of olive oil if you have some handy. Season the sauce if you need to, but the meatballs are going to give it a really nice flavour even if you don’t. (This is where you can put a whole host of different spices, but I’d stick with the classics, like oregano, salt, pepper, and garlic, unless you’re really confident with your spices, or you don’t mind making a metric shit-tonne of meat that tastes like feet.)

You can also make your own sauce if you don’t want to use the stuff from a can, and you can chop your own tomatoes too, if you’re so masochistically inclined. In my head, I’m already making meatballs, so maybe you don’t ask me to make my own sauce and we all look the other way and pretend we didn’t notice the can and make jokes about how I, too, am thick and chunky.

Once you have the sauce in the saucepan (a type of pan literally made for sauce: it’s a glorious thing), let it heat up for maybe five minutes. Then start making your meatballs. You can make them any size you like, within the bounds of reason. Remember that you’ll typically want to eat meatballs that are cooked all the way through, and that eating meatballs which are not cooked all the way through is suspiciously close to eating parasites topped with poison, so don’t make them larger than a standard golf ball.

Roll them around in your palm a bit, don’t just form them into a vague ball shape. Maybe, if you have good eye/hand co-ordination, toss them from palm to palm. This convinces the unruly meatball to become a solid mass instead of a collection of ingredients.

Place the meatballs in the sauce. You’ll want to make sure they’ll pretty well covered, but it’s not technically necessary to drown them. Medium heat is the best for this sort of thing, as you don’t want to cook the shit out of the outside of the meatballs before the inside is anywhere close to done.

Stir occasionally. Be gentle at the beginning. Use non-stick cookware if you can; these things tend to grab on the bottom of a pan and not let go. Your stirring can become more vigorous as the meatballs firm up. Keep in mind that you’re simply trying to move the meatballs around the pan, not blend them into the sauce.

When you’re done some of the sauce will be absorbed into the meatballs, and some of the rice will probably be sticking through the skin of the meatballs. Not to worry. This is perfectly natural. Serve with a sprig of freshly pretentious cilantro and perhaps some gluten-free rice noodles if you fancy the carbs.