Comforting Meatballs

It was a drizzly, gloomy day. Even the dog didn’t want to go outside. I threw a log on the fire and thought of meatballs. They are among the most comforting edible things that exist. My father’s were unparalleled; so were my mother’s, but in an entirely different way. Someone from the Jordaan neighborhood in Amsterdam would create yet another kind of meatball with shrimp, to generate the umami effect, long before anyone had even heard of such a word. I combined aspects of all three, and the