Meatballs

I think my husband’s dad fell in love with me the first time I made him meatballs.  I’ll occasionally be at the IL’s house and my father in law will give me a couple pounds of ground beef before I leave to head home, requesting meatballs.

I’ll say this, until I get this taking pictures of my food thing down, my meatloaf/meatball pictures will probably be the worst out of all my photos! Its just so dark and not awesome looking, but I can assure you they are tasty!

Meatballs

1lb of ground beef

¼ cup parmesean cheese

3/4 cup Italian breadcrumbs

1 large egg

2 tbsp of dried basil

2 or 3 tbsp of minced garlic (we like a lot of garlic so I’m always heavy handed on this)

1tsp of pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix all items together in a bowl except for the ground beef.  Once all mixed together, add ground beef and work seasonings into your ground beef. I use my hands.  By mixing the seasonings before adding your ground beef ensures that you’re getting all the flavors evenly mixed throughout the beef. depending on how big your egg is or how wet your meat is you may need to add more breadcrumbs, just keep that in mind.

Roll into balls.  Now this step is going to be a bit of personal preference.  I like my meatballs medium sized….you can make yours as small or as large as you’d like.

Spray a baking sheet with Pam/Trader Joe’s spray olive oil and line up meatballs. 

Put into oven and check in about 10 minutes.  At this point you’ll probably need to flip them or at least look at them every 5-7 minutes, they’re small and can easily burn.  I like to flip often to try and get all sides of the meatballs browned so that when you put them into sauce they don’t fall apart.  Your meatballs won’t stay nicely lined up like when you first put them on the baking sheet, by the end of all my flipping they’re all over the pan leaning on edges.  Hey, I like things browned and crispy.

Take meatballs out of oven once they looked cooked.  I would say this process shouldn’t take more than 25-30 minutes.  Again, if you made small meatballs this is probably too much time. You have to be the judge here.

Let cool and try one!

If you’re going to make homemade sauce directly following making meatballs, save the grease, or pour it directly into your sauce pan.  Recipe for homemade Pasta Sauce coming soon!

Looking at that meatball makes my mouth water!

You can also freeze meatballs.  If you’d like to do this just let them cool and then store in a freezer bag, and then put that freezer bag inside another.  Its imperitive that you let the meatballs cool all the way though before storing in the freezer. If you don’t the meatballs will more easily get freezer burned because the moisture in the ball will cause frost to form on the meatballs.