From the Books Thursday: Meatballs

A few years ago, my boss of the liquor store I used to work at (RIP Fox Run Sentry Liquor) and his wife hosted a wonderful appetizer party and had the liquor store employees over.

Karlyn is an amazing cook/chef and comes up with the most unique appetizers. She made a flank steak with a horseradish sauce, caprese salad bites, cheese & crackers platter, and homemade blue cheese crackers, but what blew me away were her meatballs (*recipe link broke and this was the closest I can now find) with cherry jalapeno sauce. I just had to have the recipe. I have made it so many times, it's almost memorized, but I still want to make sure I don't skimp on an ingredient and always have the recipes.

Since I moved home, my recipes have not been so easy to trace down. They ended up strewn over a few boxes and I was in the process of typing in the tried-and-true into my computer database, when I moved home. We were able to find a similar one online, but I'm still categorizing this under From the Books Thursday as it was in a book at one time!

I double this recipe as it's hard to just buy a 1/2 pound of meat, so I get a ton of meatballs - a good problem to have!

I had to look long and hard to find the veal this year and almost had to go without, but luckily a snowstorm delayed itself about three hours and I could get out on my lunch and check one more store. Yay for that store, as it had plenty of packs of veal.

This time I didn't have regular bread crumbs, but I had some Panko style in the fridge so I was hoping their would be no difference (Ohban Panko Style (to the tune of Gangnam Style!))

Basically, you just put all the ingredients in a large bowl and mix it up with your hands - yup get in and get dirty.

Then I lined some pans with aluminum foil and started rolling little 1.5-inch balls. I bake mine off in the oven as I have made a complete kitchen mess frying them in a pan on the stove top. The oven is much less of a mess.

 

I followed my mom's meatball recipe and baked them at 400 for about 10 minutes. I just kept checking them every time I added another completed pan to the oven, and looked for them to begin browning and using a meat thermometer, made sure they were getting to at least 160 degrees.)

The one mistake I made this time was that I didn't flip the meatballs over half way through. This gives them more of a crusty outside and makes them easier to stir in a Crockpot with sauce. They fell apart a bit at my work party, but even the scraps were eaten!

Now for the sauce, I used my mini processor (my new favorite gadget) and chopped up the onions and jalapenos for the sauce (Jeff Dunham jokes started flying around the kitchen about the Jalapeno on a Stick (pronounced Steeek - if you know and love Jeff, watch at the 4:45 mark and you will hear my fave Jalapeno on at Steeek joke!)

I combined everything but the wine together in a sauce pan and heated until it boils.

Then you remove from the heat and add the wine :)  Add any type of red wine you would like but I find Merlot and Cabernet work the best. This Bel Arbor was delightful to drink and you shouldn't cook with something you won't drink.

I put the meatballs in my mini crockpot with the sauce and voila!, delicious meatballs. The sauce has just enough bite to get the tastebuds going but not overwhelmed them.

I freeze at least half the batch of meatballs and use them in spaghetti at a later time, just thawing out a few at a time. However, this time I'll be using the second half of the batch for a New Year's party I'm going to.

Happy Eating!