Takes way longer to make than to eat.
Pronounced, “bahk’n spaw notch baw,” bacon spinach balls are a delightful treat that will have you regretting you started making it in the first place no more than an hour after you begin. Derived from pure southern curiosity, they’ve probably got a more refined culinary cousin out there somewhere that shudders around the holidays when these babies make their way around the party circuit. Part boudin ball, part hammie, this culinary flop would put a restaurant out of business on labor costs alone. But I like the way they taste.
Ingredients
- onion
- cream cheese
- cooked spinach
- shredded cheese
- bacon
- egg
- salt
- pepper
- garlic powder
- onion powder
- paprika
- parsley
- flour
- breadcrumbs
- olive oil
Method
You must first gather all the ingredients, and if you’ve already chopped your onion thinking you were making another dish, put it in an airtight container to keep in the fridge for the next time you need an onion chopped—you’ll be ahead of the game. Onion powder will be more appropriate for this recipe anyway.
The bacon is always the first part you want to cook, and it doesn’t matter how you cook it as long as it’s crispy enough to give a little crunch without being rock-hard. I’ve cooked it in the microwave on a contraption, in a pan using a variety of mess-prevention tactics that always still result in grease painting the walls, and my favorite method—in the oven at 425° on a grated pan that’s been greased with olive oil; usually takes forty-five minutes to an hour but I can use that time to prepare the other components.
Put the cream cheese in a mixing bowl and let it sit there while you move on to prepare the spinach. You are welcome to sauté fresh spinach—I would commend you for it—but the frozen block of precooked spinach will do just fine; it can be heated in the microwave, and it always helps to save time however you can. What if purgatory is really where you must spend all the time you saved? With all existential waxing aside, you are going to want to strain the cooked spinach and put it into the bowl with the cream cheese. While you’re at it go ahead and add the beaten egg into this bowl, mix it all up, and you’ll be on a roll to have these done before the kids fall asleep again. This is when you should sprinkle in some salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika and parsley. Don’t forget the parsley, it contrasts nicely with the richness of the cream cheese. You can be creative with these seasonings and adapt this to your own tastes.
I’ve often wondered to how many pounds should you limit your daily intake of bacon and unfortunately the resounding answer has always been less than one whenever I’ve looked it up. Here’s the problem with cooking bacon for a recipe: all the bacon will never make it into the recipe. You show me one warm-blooded, meat-eating human who can remove a pan of bacon from the oven without sneaking a piece and I’ll write a book called, “Every Time I Make Bacon I Burn the Roof of My Mouth.” You need to make sure most of this bacon makes its way onto a plate lined with paper towels so the grease can drip off as it air-dries. The trick to crispy bacon is not necessarily cooking it for that much longer, but rather letting it cool down a bit.
Take however much bacon you didn’t eat and crush it into little pieces; crumbles no more than a centimeter long, or half-a-centimeter if you can manage. Dump the diced bacon into the mixing bowl and begin to whip it; whip it good. Add some shredded cheese and continue mixing it all together. Now cover the bowl with aluminum foil and go put it in the refrigerator to let it get cold. This is a great time to take a break, maybe clean up the kitchen a bit. You can even leave this in the refrigerator and pick up with it tomorrow.
Next, in a Tupperware container, you will use a simple, metal whisk to mix one cup of flour with two cups of breadcrumbs, after which you will add seasonings such as salt, black pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, and paprika. Set the breadcrumb mixture on the countertop next to the mixing bowl with the cream cheese mixture that you’ve been keeping in the refrigerator and get a plate where you can place the breaded balls as you assemble them. Take a breath because here we go. Once you start you can’t stop. Well, you could, but we have got to get these finished before Christmas.
Get your melon scooper—if you don’t have one, neither did I for thirty-five years until I got married. I don’t even know if my parents even had one. We damn sure had an ice cream scooper, though, my fat ass can tell you that. But an ice cream scooper is too large for this, it needs to be the size of an avocado pit, which if you’re like me, presents another conundrum, because if a person grew up with only an ice cream scooper and no melon scooper then you know good and damn well an avocado pit is a useless reference. Make them the size of a doughnut hole, how about that? You can use a spoon; why not? We’re already accepting the linguistically irreverent spellings of donut, drive-thru, and tonite. Why use the sophistication of a sphere? That tool is one of these few kitchen gadgets that I can support, because it serves a purpose that cannot be served by any other device; the spoon is too oblong and concave to achieve the nicely rounded balls that you will scoop from the mixing bowl and place into the Tupperware of breadcrumbs.
Be careful as you toss these balls in the breadcrumbs, you can’t knock them around; unlike those chicken knockers which you squeezed, bacon spinach balls are a delicacy at this stage and must be coddled so that they don’t get bent out of shape like the left-wing American media whenever Donald Trump invites Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin to Camp David for McDonald’s cheeseburgers on the Fourth of July.
Once you’ve scooped and coated all the balls, you will heat at least a cup of olive oil in a pan, preferably a cast iron pan if you can manage to get it up on the stovetop again. The amount of oil depends on the size of your pan, and you could even deep fry these in peanut oil if you’d rather do all that. It only takes about a minute per side depending on the level of heat you use in your pan, but a low-medium in a cast iron pan should be adequate. The goal is to get them crispy and golden on the outside but not burnt, while making sure the cheese inside melts. There’s nothing raw to worry about except for the egg, which will certainly be fully cooked by the time the outside is crispy.
