May 18, 2011

Daniel Mancini is an entrepreneur after my toddler’s heart: he wants to bring the family dinner back and is doing it with meatballs.

“It’s tough for today’s parents,” said Daniel in a phone interview earlier this week. “Both parents are working and have little time for dinner. I kept seeing the garbage that was available to them and wanted to make a change.”

His inspiration? His grandmother’s Sunday Sauce and meatballs. He went back to basics and decided to bring his family recipe to market. A mere three years and one Martha Stewart Show appearance later, Mama Mancini’s Sunday Sauce and Meatballs can be found in more than 5000 stores nationwide.

It’s not just a cliche – for Daniel, the secret is really in the sauce.

“We use Italian Plum Tomatoes, Onion, Olive Oil, Garlic, Bay Leaves, Salt and Pepper,” said Daniel. “There’s no way around the slow cooking process. And there are no preservatives.”

One thing I love about Daniel’s meatballs? I know — and can pronounce — every ingredient in them: Ground Beef, Bread crumbs, Pecorino Romano Cheese, Whole Eggs, Onion, Parsley, Salt and Pepper. Nothing scary or artificial. {{Kind of refreshing, no?}}

Spaghetti and Meatballs are a staple in our house. It’s one family-friendly dish that my husband, toddler and I can all agree on. But as one of my ‘go-to’ meals, it can often feel tired or {{gasp}} boring. So Daniel gave me four fantastic ways to reinvent Italian in my house — along with permission to share his secrets with you!

Four meatball-inspired dinner ideas to try:

Meatball Pizza: Daniel swears this is a huge hit with the kiddos. All you need is a package of Mama Mancinis, a pizza shell and some mozzarella cheese. Brush the top side of the pizza shell (think Boboli) with olive oil. Crush the meatballs up in the included sauce and spread over the shell. Top with mozzarella and bake according to pizza shell directions.

Mac ‘n Mamas: An Italian twist on the classic mac ‘n cheese our kids know and love. Cook your favorite noodles as directed on the package. Mash desired amount of Mama Mancini’s Meatballs and included sauce. Add a scoop of ricotta cheese to tomato mixture and combine with noodles. Mix lightly. Pour into oven safe dish. Top with mozzarella cheese and breadcrumbs Bake 30 minutes at 350 degrees F.

Grilled Eggplant Parmesan: Out of all the ideas Daniel gave me, this is the one I’m dying to try. I adore a great eggplant parm and this one tosses in an extra special dose of healthy because it’s not fried. Slice a ripe eggplant into one inch rings. Brush with olive oil and grill. In a sauce pan, heat crushed Mama Mancini’s Meatballs in their contained sauce. Line a baking sheet with foil and spray with non-stick spray. Place eggplant rings on sheet, top with crushed meat sauce and mozzarella cheese. Place under broiler until cheese is slightly browned. Delicious.

Meat Sauce Made Easy: Don’t you love when life is made simple? Saute a little onion and mushroom in olive oil. Add crushed Mama Mancini’s Meatballs in sauce. Pour over your favorite pasta. Buon Appetit!

Want to win a year’s supply of Mama Mancini’s meatballs? Enter their Saucy Baby Contest! Just upload a photo of your cutie all sauced up to their facebook page. The photos with the most ‘likes’ will win a box of meatballs each month for a year. You have until June 3rd to upload your photo and get the votes in!

Tune-in today to hear Daniel Mancini on WOR-AM, the nation’s biggest talk radio station for the weekly
“Taste and Tell” segment on “The Joan Hamburg Show.”

The program airs from 12pm-2pm.

Listen live online here or on NYC radio at 710am

We had a great time at the Gayle King Show today.

Gayle came in first and had a meatball, which she loved. The whole staff followed – we made subs on Sullivan St Bakery ciabatta rolls and also sliced some nice loaves of pane di comune to serve alongside the meatballs and sauce. We also brought Locatelli cheese. The staff LOVED it.

We wished everyone a happy “Cinco de Meatball” while we served and talked about the meatballs.

Chris Fennimore, the key food guy in Pittsburgh wrote this blog post for his website.

I am officially declaring this the Year of the Meatball. Just ask Daniel Mancini of “Mama Mancini’s Meatballs in Sunday Sauce” or Johnny Meatballs from New Jersey. They are gearing up to meat the demand (pun intended) of the public for those little round servings of meaty delight. I predict whole cookbooks and television series devoted to this Italian staple of humble origins. Of course, other nationalities have their own version of ground meat delicacies. But my memory goes straight back to Brooklyn in the 1950′s and 1960′s when I would come home from 9 o’clock mass at St. Ephraim’s (the children’s mass). The aroma of the sauce hit me as soon as I came in the door. It was still two hours from completion but the meatballs were already bobbing in a still thin tomato sauce. Gram would cut a fresh soft roll in half and spoon on a pulpetta with a little of the sauce. You had to eat it over a dish with your elbows pointing out so the sauce would drip onto the plate. Then you mopped that up with the last of the roll. Now that was good eats. My son, Joseph, loves it when we make THE SUNDAY SAUCE and it always includes meatballs. Passing fancy? Maybe for the fickle American palate but I’ve been enjoying the same Sunday breakfast for 60 years. ”Don’t get that sauce on your white shirt!” I won’t, Gram.

One Man’s Woman

By CINDY ADAMS | March 14, 2011

Cindy Adams included a mention of National Meatball Day in her NY Post column. It is in her trademark Cindy style…[Excerpt]

“Wednesday for no reason known to mankind was National Meatball Day. And for no reason known to mankind Daniel Mancini of Mama Mancini’s offered free hot meatball subs on Sullivan Street.”

Click here for full article.

A Local Angle on ‘National Meatball Day’
In celebration of National Meatball Day, a conversation with Dan Mancini.
By Laura Griffin | Email the author | 10:11am

Yes, it’s Ash Wednesday and many in our community are fasting or abstaining from meat. It seems a curious day to celebrate National Meatball Day. But that’s the way the meatball crumbles this year!

In the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, South Orange’s Daniel Mancini decided to follow his passion. So a few years ago, he quit the garment industry, where he had made a stable living for 25 years, to make meatballs. And not just any meatballs – his grandmother’s special Sunday meatballs.

“When you think of it like that, it sounds crazy,” he said. “I just always thought, ‘Why wouldn’t it work?’ It was just taking something as simple as a meatball and finding a way to reinvent myself with it. Working in garments was a job; this is a passion. And it’s turned out really well.”

Now his grandmother’s meatballs – aka MamaMancini’s Meatballs and Sunday Sauce – are sold online and in thousands of grocery stores in the Northeast, Florida and Arizona. They will soon be sold at Whole Foods stores in California, Mancini said. (Whole Foods currently sells the meatballs at dozens of stores in the Northeast as well.)

“We’ve sold millions of meatballs,” said Mancini, who has lived in South Orange for 21 years and sold his first his first meatballs locally through Eden Gourmet.

Mancini is riding the crest of a meatball wave. The Meatball Shop restaurant opened this year on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, USA Today declared 2010 “the year of the meatball” and the NYC Wine & Food Festival recently celebrated Meatball Madness, where “the night was all about the meatball and everyone coming together to enjoy simple food,” Mancini told the anchor on Fox Business recently.

Mancini has made his grandmother’s meatballs on Martha Stewart Live , the DailyBuzz and NJ12. He’s talked meatballs on Fox Business  and in The Wall Street Journal <http://mamamancinis.com/press/a-fond-childhood-memory-inspires-a-meatball-empire/> . And easy-cooking guru Rachel Ray  called his meatballs a “revelation” and “exactly what you would make if you had the time and a fantastic Italian grandma to teach you.”

Mancini learned to cook at his Grandmother Anna’s side. She moved into his family’s Brooklyn home when he was only five years old, and she cooked all day. Every afternoon, he would help her. On Sunday morning, he awoke to the smell of her frying meatballs.

“Everyone has a scented memory that triggers something from your childhood,” he said. “For me, that’s it.”

When he was 15, Mancini said, he pleaded with her to teach him how to make her specialties.

“She came to this country with her recipes stored in her heart,” he said. “She taught me and now I have them stored in my heart.”

To produce the meatballs and get them to market, Mancini partnered with another South Orange resident, Matt Brown, who own Hors D’oeuvres Unlimited Corp., and Brown’s partner and father-in-law Carl Wolf, the former CEO of Alpine Lace.

“Dan’s passion was intoxicating,” Brown said. “Despite my initial efforts to diffuse the idea of mass producing meatballs and sauce, Dan was persistent enough to get my chefs to produce a test batch. After shopping the product around with some local help and hearing the reviews, we knew we had something special.”

Because they were introducing the meatballs in the middle of a recession, they were cautious, starting first with Eden Gourmet and then taking it a step at a time.

MamaMancini’s meatballs are such a good seller at Eden Gourmet, that they turned one of the hot bars into an all-Mancini’s bar – where shoppers can buy the regular meatballs, turkey meatballs, pasta and a rotating special.

Mancini’s passion for his grandmother’s meatballs grew out of his passion for big, lively, family dinners.

“That’s the way I grew up. We’ve always had a big Sunday family dinner,” he said. “The question every week was always ‘Who’s coming over?’ This is why I started selling the meatballs – I truly wanted to find away to get people to come back to the table.”

Martha Stewart Does a Pie Pop-up; Gotham Bar and Grill Reintroduces Its Burger

3/8/11 at 6:15 PM

Cobble Hill: Blue Marble Ice Cream, at 196 Court Street, reopens after its winter hiatus. [Pardon Me for Asking]
Ditmas Park West: Ox Cart Tavern celebrates Mardi Gras tonight by offering traditional Louisiana Gumbo and po’ boy sandwiches. [Ditmas Park Blog]
East Village: Hearth will host a “Beer vs. Wine” dinner on March 14 at 7 p.m. The $90 menu features four courses and each will be paired with one glass of wine and one beer. [Grub Street]
Lower East Side: Souvlaki GR is now open at 116 Stanton Street. [Bowery Boogie]
Peri Wine Bar opens at 179 Essex Street after a month of delays. [Bowery Boogie]
Loreley adds German hot wings to its menu at both locations. Wings are 50 cents each every Tuesday night. [Grub Street]
Nolita: The Pan American is temporarily closed for restoration after a fire damaged the interior last week. [Fork in the Road/VV]
Soho: Starting this week, Harley & Sons Fine Tea will offer tea macaroons made by Chef Kir Rodriguez at the French Culinary Institute. Flavors include rose tea, Paris tea, and sencha scent of mountain tea. [Grub Street]

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Union Square: In honor of National Meatball Day tomorrow, MamaMancini’s offers a number of ways to score free food, including a chance to win a year’s worth of free meatballs. [Grub Street]
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West Village: Martha Stewart will open a pop-up pie shop at the little owl on March 26 and 27 to promote her latest cookbook, New Pies & Tarts. The shop will offer baked pies, fruit tarts, galettes, and beverages. [Fork in the Road/VV]
Gotham Bar and Grill is bringing back its house burger, making it the first burger on the menu in years. The $22 Gotham dry-aged burger is available on the lunch menu and includes Italian black-truffle cheese, tomato confit, pickles, and roasted-garlic aïoli, with a side of Kennebec fries. [Grub Street]
Paris Commune offers a $12, two-course lunch special from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays. The menu features items like chicken soup and walnut-cranberry chicken salad. [Grub Street]

Get Free Meatballs Delivered To You In Honor Of National Meatball Day!

By Kristian Laliberte

Although some of us here are on a six-pack by June strategy (after many, many false starts), tomorrow’s holiday is threatening to throw a major wrench in our fitness plans. Yes carnivores, it’s National Meatball Day! In celebration of America’s greatest food fest, MamaMancini is giving away a free, hot MamaMancini’s Meatball and Sunday Sauce sandwich on Sullivan Bakery bread or a dish of MamaMancini’s Meatballs and Sunday Sauce with dipping bread—delivered to your home or office. For the waistline-expanding treat (but so, so worth it) email meatballday@mamamancinis.com, the first 50 to do so will be enjoying tasty balls tomorrow. The delivery service is from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. on March 9th only, in the Manhattan area. For more deets, click here.