Meatball Night for the fambam. We are a family of 8. Making dinner is a chore at times but posting in here will make it easier for me to look back on to pull ideas from. It may help others who also get stuck with dinner as well!
I pulled inspiration today from the ground turkey that we had in the fridge that was waiting to be used. It was a 2.5 lb. package of fairly lean turkey: 93% fat free.
I pulled ideas from several recipes and decided to wing it. I grabbed Worcestershire sauce, Seasoning Sauce, Bread Crumbs, Garlic, and 2 eggs.
I added a few tablespoons of the seasoning sauce, worcestershire, and garlic. I added about 3/4 cups of bread crumbs and also the eggs.
Mix it all together, and beware- because if you take the turkey straight out of the fridge to mix by hand- your hands will freeze! I had to take a break a couple times because my hands got so cold. I also grabbed my large cookie scooper to scoop the meatballs and then rolled them by hand.
I experimented with cooking them in the skillet versus baking them in the oven.
In the oven, I baked them at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes on the convection bake setting.
In the skillet, I turned them every few minutes. In the end, I prefer baking them and then transferring them to the skillet to brown them a little after they have been baked. They also retained their round shape better, in my opinion.
After pulling them from the oven, I transferred to the skillet. The other experiment we did was adding Tajin. After tasting some of the experimental tajin balls, we decided they were so good that we sprinkled tajin on the rest of them.
I also cooked up some pasta. I always add a heaping amount of salt and olive oil to the boiling water.
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I also steamed some broccoli "real quick" to get the kids some extra veggies. I love the steamer vegetable bags that you can throw in the microwave.
wow that is a big picture of broccoli
Now to the plating! I have kids, so we have the option of the kid plate with noodles, red sauce, meatballs and veggies:
Then we have dad and other kids who want a more hearty plate, and for that we add capers, mozzarella cheese to the noodles and meatballs. We also add olive tapenade to the broccoli:
Lastly, for those of us.....me.....not trying to eat a ton of pasta right now, we have the lighter healthier version that is really just cutting out the pasta and enjoying a bigger helping of meatballs and veggies:
They are the most beautiful pictures of plated food. They are just "real life" pictures of our meals on our paper plates before we fed our faces for the night.
Cost wise, this was all for less than $20 as well. We have to save our money for gas nowadays. Ha!