Preparation time: 25 minutes
Expense: 5 Euros

Meatballs are a thrifty food par-excellence. Nowadays meatballs are made with pure ground beef, but the very concept of meatball includes the fact that leftovers are minced and mixed with other simple ingredients to create a new flavorful dish. This is as it used to be in order to recover all the edible scraps of food that would not constitute a whole dish if taken singularly.
There is an even more thrifty way to taste a new dish. Since meat used to be very expensive (a rarity), popular wisdom created bread balls to fry. With the help of one egg and a little flour to hold the ingredients together, these bread “meatballs” are a wonderful alternative to a meat dish, and a great way to use up some ingredients you may have leftover.

Ingredients:
- 450 grams of stale bread
- 3 ripe tomatoes
- 1 egg
- 2 spoons of flour
- 4 scallion onions
- Salt and Pepper
- Milk
- Olive oil
- Basil

Preparation:
Break the bread into chunks and poor enough milk on top to soak it completely. Meanwhile, get the tomatoes and put them in a pan with boiling water for 2 minutes. Remove the skin of tomatoes and dice them. Now you can squeeze the excess milk from the bread. Using your hands, crumble the bread and set it in a bowl. Add the egg, tomatoes, flour, the minced scallions (you may include as much of the green as you like, remembering this part can be a little bitter and hard to digest), salt and pepper to taste, and the minced basil.
Mixed everything thoroughly and form oval or round balls. It is advisable to prepare a pan with abundant hot frying oil to start deep frying the bread balls as soon as you have formed them with your hands. Buon appetito!

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