I always try to get ahead — on housework, cooking, and school prep — over the long Christmas break.
I always fail.
But I always try.
This year, I scarcely even tried to get ahead on housework. I guess the decluttering and laundry will have to be shoehorned in during the evenings and weekends. Or maybe spring break.
I did, however, buy a few packages of chicken breasts and ground beef that were on sale. I cooked and shredded some of the chicken to use in chicken taquitos and poppyseed chicken.
I turned the ground beef into a few meals’ worth of cooked, seasoned taco meat and several meals’ worth of these Italian-style meatballs. I love them because I can freeze them on a cookie sheet until they are solid and then place them all in a large freezer bag so that I can pull out only as many as I need for a meal.
They thaw and heat through very quickly, enabling me to serve “fast” food without buying fast food. Plus, spaghetti with meatballs in marinara feels so much fancier than spaghetti with a regular meat sauce. It’s basically the same thing, and yet meatballs feel like something you’d serve to company, and meat sauce feels like something you’d serve on an ordinary Tuesday.
I think that’s another reason I love these meatballs: I can feel like I’ve made a restaurant-quality meal with little to no prep work.
This time, too, I used the ingredients I had on hand instead of following a recipe rigidly. I have two favorite recipes for Italian-style meatballs, but each requires a couple of ingredients I don’t keep on hand all the time. This time around, I blended the two and used only what I already had in the refrigerator and pantry.
Zayley wanted to help with this project, and it was a perfect recipe for us to work on together. She crushed a sleeve of crackers to make the cracker crumbs and helped decide how much to add (“I think we need just a fewwwww more, Mama!”). I showed her how to wet her hands so the meatball mixture wouldn’t stick, and we shaped them together.
We made the meatballs using three pounds of meat, which will feed our family of five for three or four meals. I adjusted the recipe below for one pound of meat, but it is proportional: if you want to make extra so you, too, can feed your freezer, just multiply the recipe by the number of pounds of meat you are using.
Amelia Plair is a mom and high school teacher in Starkville. Email reaches her at [email protected].
BASIC ITALIAN MEATBALLS
1 pound ground beef (or a mixture of ground beef and ground pork)
1 teaspoon Italian herb paste (from the refrigerated section near the fresh herbs)
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese (the kind in the can is fine)
1/4 cup cracker crumbs or breadcrumbs
1 clove minced garlic
1 egg
Salt (to taste, or about 1/8 teaspoon.; remember that the Parmesan cheese and cracker crumbs are also salty)
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