Spaghetti and Meatballs, and other random things I need to do today
On the menu tonight is spaghetti and meatballs. I had meant to get my sister's 'best ever' meatball recipe from her, but alas she had to go out of town for an interview and the recipe remains ever elusive. However, my recipe is hopefully good enough (I've never tried it before and will be making changes: see below) and will hopefully produce plenty of yummy and delicious meatballs, with the extras being frozen for another day when I might not feel like cooking. Simply toss frozen meatballs into the slow cooker with canned spaghetti sauce, and voila! Next time I might try tomato sauce from scratch, but today we have a jar of Bertolli organic spaghetti sauce, and really trying a new meatball recipe and a new spaghetti sauce recipe at the same time is very unscientific. If we ended up not liking it, it would be impossible to tell what the culprit was. Bad meatballs? Maybe... or could it be bad sauce? No, just one variable at a time, thank you.
Meatball Recipe (my changes in bold, and the end result will be doubled -- but it would be too confusing if I changed EVERYTHING). According to the recipe, it should yield 16 servings after I double it.
- 1 pound ground beef
- no ground veal (too expensive)
- 3/4 pound ground pork (because that's what I have...)
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese (Romano is, again, too expensive)
- 1 1/2 tsp dried parsley (because I don't have fresh)
- salt and ground black pepper to taste
- 2 cups stale French baguette, crumbled (because it was on sale and Italian bread was twice as expensive)
- 1 1/2 cups lukewarm water
- no olive oil (because I'm not going to fry them -- I either bake my meatballs or simmer them in sauce)
If I'm feeling really industrious around lunchtime, I might put some dough in the breadmachine. I DO know how to make bread from scratch (homemade bread was actually the first food I ever made by myself -- I think that if it had turned out bad I might never have tried anything else...) and love the satisfaction of it, but on a busy day like today I take all the help I can get. I would like to make garlic bread. Mmmm... spaghetti and meatballs and garlic bread. That would make me (and hopefully my husband, too) very happy for dinner.
Categories:
food
Yes, it would make your husband very happy for dinner.
Mmm... organic spaghetti sauce... *cough* -- I mean, mmm... meatballs...
I think I used the same recipe as you linked (without the veal) every time I've made meatballs (one time with yogurt instead of milk, but I don't recommend that). Unless you mean the meatball recipe from my lately-acquired cookbook. I can bring that Wednesday.
Just one question: do your baked meatballs come out round? Mine always come out more like polyhedra than spheres when I fry them.
-La <--- geek
I meant the one from your new cookbook. I think baked meatballs usually turn out looking like your typical scoop of ice cream, round on top, flat on bottom and slightly smooshed. Not really round, if I'm remembering correctly.
This time I used a really deep 1/4 cup measure, which I got as a wedding present, to form the meatballs. This meant that they weren't spherical to begin with, but they were all the same size and shape. So that's better than I've done before already... lol
My favorite way to make meatballs is to simmer them in the sauce. But you have to do it for hours, or they just come out okay. This is why I only actually cooked 8 of the meatballs yesterday -- just enough for dinner and lunch today. The rest I will make at a later date in the slow cooker. The all-day simmered taste of meatballs in spaghetti sauce is just wonderful, imo.
polyhedra. Now there's a rare word. How many geeks know the plural of polyhedron? And how many linguists even know what a polyhedron is?
And how many chefs would compare their meatballs to a multifaceted three dimensional geometric figure? Well, someone else's meatballs, maybe...
FIL