We Be A-Makin' Da Meat-A Balls Today

When we had the restaurant, we made our meat balls for the spaghetti sauce from scratch. During the summer when it was so busy we had a hard time keeping ahead on the food, we had a gal who came in for two hours every morning (before her regular job, bless her heart) to help us prep for the day. Most days she found "Make Meat Balls" on the list waiting for her. She quickly dubbed herself "The Meat Ball Queen" and actually became quite proud of her nicely shaped, uniformly sized meat balls.

Every now and then I make a batch of those same meat balls and squirrel them away in the freezer. Then I can easily take out how ever many I need for Barbequed Meat Balls, Meat Balls in Gravy, Spaghetti Sauce, etc.

They smell wonderful when cooking and the aroma stayed in my kitchen all day today. Wish I had a gourmet-ish name for them. But they're just:

MEAT BALLS

Soak four slices of dry bread in water for about 2-3 minutes.

With your hands, squeeze out all the water you can from the bread, drop into a mixing bowl and break apart the clumps of wet bread with your fingers.

Then add all the rest of the ingredients into the bowl with the bread.

1 lb. ground beef
2 eggs
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon dried parsley
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Mix all of the ingredients until well blended.
Form balls of approximately 1-1/2 ounces each by rolling a small amount of mixture between your hands.

Place the balls on racks that have been placed on a cookie sheet with a lip.

Bake meat balls in a 500° oven for 20 minutes.

When meat balls finish baking, remove from oven and cool or use immediately.

After they have cooled, freeze any remainders for future use.

Notes: When removing the meat balls from the oven, I take a spatula and loosen the hot meat balls from the racks. Sometimes they tend to settle down into the racks but if you loosen them when they're hot, they come right off.

These meat balls aren't highly seasoned or spicy but you certainly could add whatever "zing" you wanted to them.

I usually do twice this amount at a time (just double everything in the above recipe) but I had a pound of ground beef defrosted that I had planned on using tonight (then had a change of plans) so I made only a one-pound batch this time around.

Getting these meat balls made today was about the only planned project I got accomplished.

I shan't repeat it here, but if you wish to read more of how things have been going lately, go over to my quilting blog where I'm afraid I went on and on about the little struggles and diffooculties we've been battling lately.

One other thing I did do was to make it to the library today so now I'm going to go take a hot shower, throw an extra quilt on the bed, and snuggle down with a new book.