"That's a spicy meatball!"

I had a hankering for meatballs the other day.

Does anyone say 'hankering' anymore?

Anyway, I was watching Ina Garten on the television, and she made turkey meatballs.  She was very practical about her meal.  She made the meatballs from scratch, so she justified the use of sauce from a jar.  I could do that too!

Except, I had ground beef, and turkey patties, and I'm not too fond of red pepper flakes. And, I wanted to use some fresh herbs and spinach from my garden.

So, off to Google I go, to explore recipe ideas, trying to keep in mind my macros.

I couldn't find a single recipe that fit every want, so I took the basics and made it my own.  The basics included: meat, egg, bread crumbs, salt, pepper.  The add-ons: home grown spinach and basil, minced garlic, and Cholula hot sauce.

Stay with me.

I really should have taken a picture before I mixed them and rolled them, but here's what they looked like:

Because the food scale is my new best friend, each meatball was approx. 2.75 oz pre-cooked.  They went into a 400 degree oven for 25 minutes.

I boiled spaghetti, warmed the pasta sauce in a pot, then added my meatballs to the sauce, just to warm through. You might ask why they needed to be warmed up if they were just taken out of the oven.  Well, I cooked the meatballs about 2 hours before dinner.  I then channeled my inner Ina, put everything in a platter, just to be fancy.

Just add torn basil leaves.  It makes it look pretty.

This is what my individual serving looked like. The hot sauce gave it good flavor, without being too hot, and I was able to sneak some spinach and basil in them, and the kids ate them up with no objections.  Owen even asked for seconds.

Meatball Recipe

1.5 pounds of ground beef 90/10

2 turkey patties (8 oz. 93/7)

3 tsps. Cholula

1 tsp. minced garlic

5 large spinach leaves (cut)

10 basil leaves (cut, leave 2-3 for garnish)

1 large egg

1/3 cup of Italian seasoned bread crumbs

Salt/Pepper to taste (about 1 tsp. each)

Preheat oven to 400.

Throw all ingredients in a bowl, mix with your hands. 

I used an ice cream scooper and food scale to get approximately the same size meatballs.

Cook meatballs for 25 minutes.

Makes 13 meatballs.

2 meatballs is more than enough to fill you up.

Macros per meatball: 7g fat, 2g carbs, 15g protein

These were great the next day too.

Enjoy!



Soup Weather

It's been raining all day. 

It's dark, gloomy, and on the cool side.

It's a perfect day for some soup.

The hubby wanted me to make chicken tortilla soup, but I didn't have a 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes, cream, or avocados.  To make it, I would have had to change out of pajamas and face the rain.  I opted to talk him into plain chicken soup instead.

To start, I boiled 4 chicken breasts (all I had but bone in chicken would be wonderful here), in a large pot, seasoned with salt and garlic powder for 30 minutes.

I'm a big fan of clean broth so once the chicken was done, I transferred the breasts into a bowl for shredding (covered with broth so the chicken wouldn't harden) and I then strained the remaining broth into a smaller pot.

I brought the broth back up to a boil and then I added: potatoes (peeled and diced), carrots (peeled and diced), celery (diced), a chunk of onion (for flavor and was removed after the soup was done) and a cube of cilantro.  I made sure to season (salt and pepper) the potatoes and carrots before adding them to the broth.  I let everything come up to a boil for about 10 minutes.

I was originally going to shred the chicken, but decided that big, diced, chunks of chicken would be better and added it to the soup.  I let it continue to cook about 15 minutes until the vegetables were fork tender.

While the soup cooked, the hubby was nice enough to make a cup of red rice for me.  Recipe to follow in another post.

We topped it off with some Cholula for a kick.

It was a great choice for a not so great day.