Meatballs are good anytime of year especially in the winter months when they can bring warmth to our tables. Here's a recipe that you can use over and over and, of course, it has 4 ingredients! Here's what you'll need:
A pound of ground turkey or beef (Our family prefers turkey.)
1/4 cup of finely chopped onion.
1&1/2 teaspoons of Italian herbs
Marinara Pasta Sauce
(Opt. 1/8 of a teaspoon of red pepper flakes)
Preheat oven to 400. Mix all the ingredients in a bowl with 3/4 teaspoon of garlic salt. Cover the bottom of a skillet with a thin layer of cooking oil and heat on medium. Shape mixture into 1 & 1/2 inch balls then place them in the hot skillet and brown them on both sides. You then place the meatballs on a cookie sheet and bake them. (Beef meatballs can be cooked for 5 to 7 min. and turkey meatballs need to be cooked for longer--7 to 9 min.--to make sure they are cooked all the way through.) Add meatballs to warmed Marinara Sauce and serve over pasta or spaghetti squash.
TRY ‘EM YOU'LL LOVE IT!
The Scoop on Marinara
“Mariner’s” sauce originated in Naples; nobody’s sure how it got its name but one theory is that it was invented by mariners returning from the Americas with a newly discovered fruit, the tomato, in the 1700s. Funny thing is that even though a tomato is technically a fruit because of it's seed structure just like zucchini, in 1893 the Supreme Court ruled tomatoes as vegetables. Now I'm all mixed up in the tomato department!
Eenie Meenie Miney Mo? (Yes, this is how you spell that.)
How do we know what Marinara sauce to use? The Chicago Tribune did a blind taste test with 12 marinara sauces. Two of the sauces pictured tested in the top 3. Rao's was #1 and Riserva was #3. (Both can be found at Target and Walmart who by the way seem to carry everything!) There is also pictured "Farmer's Market" by Prego which wasn't one of the ones tested I just like farmer's markets.
We recently had our good friends Lara and Skip Lanfried (Newport Beach) over and, of course, I made us all taste test the three marinara sauces pictured. Two of us chose the Riserva, two of us chose "Farmer's Market" and no one chose the Rao's. (Of course, our palettes may be lacking just a bit.) I do think it's interesting that the Rao's costs $10 which is more than double the cost of the others. You can buy a shirt for that!
Looking Back Middle-Eastern Meatballs
Middle-Eastern Meatballs
Last May Pickett's Pearls had a post on Turkey and Zucchini Meatballs. A major favorite around the Pickett home!!! They are superb! You should check 'em out if you haven't already.