Because sometimes you need spaghetti and meatballs

Sometimes you need spaghetti and meatballs.  You just really do.  It is a very rare occasion for me, but it happens.  I actually can't remember the last time I had spaghetti and meatballs.  I usually use turkey Italian sausage or eat spaghetti on a meatless day so it must be without meat.  However, today I wanted meatballs.

Luckily, when I made burgers for my birthday, ground beef was on sale (yay! savings!), so I bought two pounds, used 1/2 a pound and froze the rest.  I might not have had meatballs in the freezer, but I could make them easily enough.

Really, all I did for this was make the meatballs. The rest was store bought.  I used spinach pasta from Whole Foods (so good) and Classico Sweet Basil Marinara sauce.  I love all the Classico products.  I use their pesto and their pizza sauce as well.

Cheesy Meatballs

1/4 pound 93/7 ground beef
1 tablespoon breadcrumbs or crushed crackers
Garlic powder
Italian seasoning

1/2 tablespoon egg beaters
1/2+ tablespoon milk
1 tablespoon cheese



Step one is pretty easy.  Throw the meat (thawed) into a bowl.  Put the breadcrumbs or crushed crackers and seasoning on top.  I went a little crazy with the garlic and Italian seasoning because I was using cracker crumbs and not seasoned bread crumbs.  Season it to taste.

Mix all of that together by hand.  Sorry folks, but it really needs to be by hand.  Then add the egg beaters and milk.  Mix it again to see the texture because you may need a bit more milk.  You want it moist so it will form a ball.  Then add the cheese and mix again.  BY HAND. 

Roll them into balls.  I like little mini meatballs, mainly because they cook faster, but also because they are cute.  Mini=cute.  You know it does.

While these are sitting, I put my water on to make my pasta.

Then I fried the meatballs in a pan.  I like them to have a nice crust on them.

I fried them on as many sides as I could.  Crust.  You can see that they have a little pink in them still.  That is fine, because you are going to boil them in your sauce anyway.

I added my jarred sauce and water.  If I had any red wine, I would have added that instead.  However, since I knew I was going to be boiling this for a while, I knew I needed extra moisture or I would have no sauce left.

I also put a lid on the pan so that the meatballs would steam a bit.  The difficult part here is to know when the meatballs are done.  I wasn't very even with the meatball size, so I ended up pulling the largest couple first and cutting them in half.  You have to take them out of the pan or they just fall into the sauce again.  It took about 15ish minutes.  Of course, it depends on the size of the meatballs.  you can also bake these in the sauce, but that will take a long time and I have no patience at all.

I served it topped with more of the six cheese blend that I had put in the meatballs.  It was a good cold weather comfort food meal :-)