Saturday, February 6, 2010

modified meatballs

so I made these delish sweet and sour meatballs from My Kitchen Cafe. This was my second attempt making them, so I modified the recipe slightly to fit our tastes. Below is the recipe from her blog. Just so you know, this is one of my FAVORITE cooking blogs. Everything that I have made from her blog has tasted so good. So, go there and make her yummy recipes. Back to the meatballs, these little suckers are amazing. Sweet, tangy, easy, and a definite crowd pleaser. Here is the meatball recipe as it appears on her site for your reference and my ease...

Sweet and Sour Meatballs
adapted from Lion House Recipes

Serves 4-6

1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef (you don't want the beef to be too high in fat because the fat will all pool at the bottom of the baking dish after baking - big time grody-ness in my book)
3/4 cup quick oats
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1/2 cup finely chopped onion
1/2 cup milk
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Combine all of the ingredients and mix well. Form into about 12 balls, each about 2 inches in diameter. Place in a casserole dish. Cover with sauce (below). Bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes. Serve over rice.

**HERE IS WHERE I CHANGED IT**

Sauce:
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoon mustard
1/2 cup (or a little more) barbeque sauce
2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Combine ingredients and blend thoroughly. Heat in a small saucepan until combined and sugar is dissolved and pour over meatballs. (This dish is not overly abundant on sauce so if you enjoy things a bit saucier, double the sauce ingredients.)

*Freezable Meal: After covering the meatballs with sauce, cover the pan with two layers of aluminum foil and freeze. To bake, preheat the oven to 350 degrees and bake covered without thawing for 1 hour. Uncover and bake 20-30 minutes more, until meatballs are cooked through.
**NOTES**

My big change was the sauce. The original sauce was WAY too sour for me. It tasted too strongly of vinegar and not sweet enough for us. So I changed her original recipe and doubled the sauce except for the apple cider vinegar. The results were so much better. We also had them with egg noodles. We like egg noodles more than white rice with meatballs in this house. I also made the meatballs a little bit smaller so I had enough meat to bake smaller meatballs to freeze for another day. I really like the meatballs. Very very moist and then coated with delish sauce. Mmmm. So glad there are leftovers.

1 comment:

  1. I did something similar to mellow the acidity of the sauce. I used honey barbecue sauce instead of "regular," which sweetened it more, so I didn't quite double the brown sugar, but I definitely did reduce the amount of cider vinegar. We like our meatballs smaller too, & we eat them with brown rice usually.

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