Meet Meatballs!

OK, this is my next Ode To Meat = Food post.

Yesterday we did The Great Meatball Experiment (me and Ry, my 11 year old daughter).

We used this:

2.5 lbs ground meat (I got the cheaper kind, not chuck, it's about 85/15 I guess)
1.0 lb 'hot' breakfast sausage
1.0 lb 'mild' breakfast sausage

I let it sit briefly on the counter, as the colder it is, the harder to mix it up.

Break/pull/cut it into small pieces mixed up in a big bowl, then use your fingers and mush it all together so it's all well blended.

Then I tossed in:

1 handful of flax seed meal (ground seed - this is a binding agent, works like egg)
1 handful of almond meal
1 handful of parmesan cheese (powdered)
1 egg

and used my hands to mix all that stuff up.

You could leave out the flax and almond, this is just what I chose to use.

Then I added:

a bunch (yes, that's the technical measure. Whatever you like!) of:

Garlic powder
Onion powder
sea salt
cracked black pepper
basil
oregano
parsley

and used my hands to mix all that stuff up.

Had I not been cooking for the kid too, I'd have added a ton of red pepper flakes. I can eat pepper flakes on nearly everything.

I imagine you can cook this on a cookie sheet. I bought an oversized roasting pan at the dollar store, sprayed it with pam, and put the meatballs in there.

It made about 48, 1.5oz meatballs (about golf ball size) from that 72 oz of meat.

We made most of these just as-is above.

On a section of 8 (we used some foil to create a 'section' in the roaster so the juices wouldn't run into each other), we mixed in a bunch of A1 Steak Sauce because I couldn't find the worcestershire I wanted to use.

On another section of 8, we mixed in a bunch of soy sauce (a gluten free sort).

And just for kicks, on one oversized meatball we add rosemary and caraway seed.

RATINGS:

Standard meatballs: tastes astounding like a heavy meatloaf, and a good one. I didn't realize that the flax, almond, parmesan and egg would have that effect. I actually like meatloaf, but no-bread-crumbs on lowcarb made it off-limits. I see I could use this recipe approach for it. We liked them well enough to eat them plain and like it.

But we like 1-carb ketchup, so we dipped over half of them in some of that.

Soy-sauce meatballs: this adds carbs of course, but the kid liked these best.

Steak-sauce meatballs: this adds carbs of course. I like it, but they ended up tasting pretty sweet all things considered.

My buddy Amory suggests:

...baking meatballs, and tossing them into a crockpot with a mixture of Heinz 1 carb Ketchup, Walden Farm's Thick n Spicy bbq sauce, Sweetzfree, spicy mustard, and a little garlic powder. This creates a sweet, thick, spicy Swedish Meatball-like sauce.

That sounded good enough I thought I'd put it here even though I haven't tried it yet. I don't have any barbecue sauce so I'll have to wait until I get some.

Rosemary-Caraway Meatballs: this was a really interesting combination. I liked the taste of it, but it was a sort of 'strong novelty' that I don't think I could eat very many of.

Amory's original recipe used ground turkey and turkey sausage. I didn't have any but when I do, I hope to try adding some chicken-flavored bouillon and shredded cheddar cheese to one, and then dipping it in mexican green salsa. I know that sounds bizarre. I used to make tacos out of chicken stuffing, with cheddar cheese and green taco sauce. It was a weird combination, but everyone I had try it actually liked it.

I had planned to dip these in ranch or blue cheese dressings, they just never made it that far. They would be good that way, though.

Me and the kid managed to eat an embarrassing quantity of these last night, and we finished them off by about noon today.

I think some soft-boiled/fried eggs in the morning, chopped up and mixed with some nuked cut up meatballs (so the egg got all over them), would be really yummy too.

Amory also once suggested that you could use spaghetti sauce and some cheese with these too. I suppose, if you wanted, you could use enchilada sauce and some cheese also.

We are making this one of our constant staples now. I love the idea of having stuff frozen or fridged that we can just nuke and dip as something yummy but also nearly solid protein/fat and super low carb.

Did I mention even the kid is getting smaller? The scale actually went up (probably from eating more protein the last 3 weeks than in any 2-3 months of her life, and super minimal carbs), but her size is reducing, we can both tell. Yay!!