When life hands you tomato sauce, make meatballs 🙂
On our last post, we featured a quick and easy homemade tomato sauce made in an Instant Pot. The beauty of having lots of tomato sauce is that you’re set for a variety of meals. You can make veal sandwiches, pizza, pasta and even fish. Today I decided to make easy three-meat meatballs.
But aren’t meatballs a lot of work?
Actually… they’re not! If you have a nice tomato sauce ready to go, the meatballs are easy and quick to make. Basically all the ingredients get tossed in a large bowl and then you roll the meat into balls. The formed meatballs then cook for about a half hour in the tomato sauce and voilà… home cooked meatballs! Cook up some pasta while the meatballs are simmering and you’ve got a whole meal ready to eat in no time.
Homemade and delicious!
I appreciate knowing the ingredients in the food we eat, and I like controlling the seasoning and spices to our taste. And while I can’t always do homemade (because life, as you know, keeps us busy), it always feels so good when I can make homemade meals. The truth is that many fresh homemade meals take no longer than the time it takes to go out to eat, or to pickup take-out, or to prepare a pre-packed frozen boxed meal… and it’s normally a less expensive and healthier option too.
I’m sure you can find frozen meatballs that are quite good, but I’m confident that this recipe will stand up to them. The soaked bread keeps them moist and tender, and the variety of meat and spices makes them taste fantastic. That kind of quality and flavour doesn’t come from a box.
In our house, we’re huge fans of Italian food, so these meatballs with our fresh homemade sauce, and fresh pasta were a no-brainer for us. It was an all thumbs-up kind of meal. I encourage you to give this easy meatball recipe a try and see how easy it is to eat well, friends!
Easy and Delicious Three Meat Meatballs
Ingredients
- 2 slices white sliced bread, with crust edges cut off
- 1/4 cup milk
- .75 lbs (340g) ground beef chuck
- .75 lbs (340g) lean ground pork
- .75 lbs (340g) white ground veal
- 1 tbsp coarse sea salt (2 tsp if using fine salt)
- 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
- 1 medium cooking onion, finely diced
- 4 cloves garlic, finely diced
- 1/2 cup fresh parsley, chopped
- 1/4 cup fresh basil, chopped
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 8 cups your favourite tomato sauce (we used our own homemade Tomato Sauce 2.0 | Instant Pot)
Instructions
- Place a large wide pan on the stove and pour in the tomato sauce.
- Heat the pan and sauce on medium.
- Use a small (or regular) food processor to tear apart the bread into very small pieces, like bread large crumbs.
- Place the shredded bread and milk in a small bowl and mix, to coat the bread completely. Let sit for 5 minutes.
- In a large bowl, place the ground meats, salt, ground pepper, onion, garlic, parsley, basil, olive oil and soaked bread pieces.
- Toss all the ingredients with your (washed) hands to mix well.
- Use a soup spoon or small cookie dough scoop to measure out potions of the meat mixture.
- Roll the portions of meat between your hands to form meat "balls".
- Place each meatball in the sauce while forming them. It might feel like a tight squeeze by the end, but don't worry, they'll shrink a bit while cooking.
- Once all the meatball mix is used up and all the meatballs are in the sauce, raise the heat to medium high until the sauce starts to boil/bubble.
- Lower the heat to medium and cover. Cook / simmer for 30 minutes.
- Your meatballs are ready to serve with your favourite pasta, in a sandwich or on their own as an appetizer.
Leave a Reply