first attempt at Russian Katleta (meatball)

I grew up eating Russian food, and one of the most basic meat dishes is a katleta...it's the Russian equivalent of a chicken cutlet, except with ground meat. I guess it's more like a meatball.

You will need:
1 lb of pork
1 raw potatoe
1 egg
1/ 4 of an onion
1 teaspoon cumin (or oregano or rosemary or whatever spice floats your boat)
1 cup of bread crumbs

Anyway, I bought 1 lb of ground pork, but you can use any meat and a combination of them if you want, like pork and turkey, beef and pork, etc...

In a seperate bowl, shred a whole potatoe (PEEL IT FIRST!!) so it's wet little pieces, and then crack 1 whole egg into it...it's going to look disgusting. Whisk it all together.

Then shred in about 1/4 of an onion (depends on how much you like onions), and then throw in THE RAW MEAT!! Add SALT AND PEPPER (VERY important, because meat tastes oh so much better when it's salted) and a bit of cumin or rosemary or whatever spice does it for you.





Next step, wash your hands, you dirty person, you. Now start mixing and mushing all of these wet ingredients together...it will feel disgusting...you may cry out...I did...I hate handling raw meat.

Next, after everything is mixed together, pick up half a palms worth of the raw meat mixture, and shape them into ovals (or flat circles - i say to make them flat because they will really puff up on the skillet when cooked) and then you do this



you make "x"'s on the katleta's with a knife because we want to pretend we are Zorro...except with an X...so I guess that would make us Xorro?? Actually, both my mom and grandmother told me to do this before i put the katleta's on the skillet, i'm still not sure why, but I decided to blindly do what they told me to do. I'm not proud of it.

Okay, then we put them on a skillet with some oil ( i used canola oil) and we fry them for about 5 minutes on each side ( COVER T