Meatball Madness

About 4 times a year my mom, grandmother, sister, and I all get together and make homemade meatballs. It has been a tradition ever since I can remember.  Being part of an Italian family means we have pasta and meatballs a lot!  I can’t say I’m mad about that because I really enjoy them! We make our own sauce and meatballs, however, the meatballs are definitely everyone’s favorite part!  The recipe I am going to share with you comes from my great grandmother, who is actually from Italy.  She came up with the recipe many, many years ago and it has since been modified over the years by my grandmother and mom.

Ingredients:

5 pounds ground meat 

4 eggs

6 tablespoons dried parsley

5 ½ cups whole milk

5 tablespoons salt

3-4 tablespoons crushed garlic (depending on how much garlic you like)

4 cups plain bread crumbs

Directions:

-Preheat oven to 400 degrees

-Wipe olive oil on bottom of baking sheet, just enough to make it greasy

-Roll meatballs into 2-2.5 inch balls and lay on baking sheets in rows, not touching

-Should be able to make about 80 meatballs, depending on how big you make them

-Bake for 25 minutes or until meatballs are cooked throughout and outside is browned)

The original meatball recipe required the meatballs to be fried but a few years back we decided to start baking them.  Baking the meatballs made them a lot healthier because they no longer had all the added fat from the oil and they still tasted just as good!  Also, since we make batches of 120-150 meatballs every time, baking them allowed us to cook a lot more at once so not only did it make them healthier but it really cut down on our overall cooking time and mess! 

*Also, if you are really looking to be healthy, replace the ground meat with ground turkey.  The taste will change a bit but they are still good, especially when covered in sauce! Or you can try replacing the whole milk with 2% or 1%, however, it will make them slightly harder.  Lastly, if you are making spaghetti and meatballs, try replacing spaghetti with spaghetti squash or zucchini noodles!

MG