Meatballs

Mouth watering, delicious meatballs

It's a family tradition to get together a couple of times a year to make pounds and pounds of meatballs for freezing and enjoying later. Today, we did our summer batch, and the stats are astounding: we used roughly 14 pounds of ingredients to yield 20 dozen meatballs for just $35 in under 3 hours. I'll walk you through how we did it, and then provide a pared down recipe at the end so that you can try it out for yourself without having to invest the amount of time we did. Don't worry, make these bad boys once, and you'll want to make big batches, too!

First up, groceries! We got all of our food at Walmart because I decided to do this at the last minute, but if you're making a bulk batch, we highly suggest you consider pricing out your meat at someplace that sells it in bulk such as Costco or Sam's Club.

5 lbs. Ground Pork

7 lbs. Ground Beef

6 Carrots (About 2 1/2 cups ground in food processor)

4 Stalks Celery (About 3/4 cups ground in food processor)

1 1/2 large onions (About 3 cups ground in food processor)

5 Eggs

1 cup grated parmesan cheese

3 cups plain bread crumbs

1/2 cup ketchup

1/4 cup mustard

1/3 cup Worcestershire sauce

1 tbs. salt

1/2 tbs. black pepper

1 tbs. hot paprika

1 tbs. oregano

1 tbs. basil

1 tbs. tarragon or thyme

3 tbs. minced garlic (roughly 6 cloves if you do it yourself)

A few of my mother's advice on the ingredients follow:

• You can substitute turkey for pork if you keep kosher or otherwise dislike pork. We use pork because it is delicious and more affordable.
• It may not seem like enough salt, but most sauces used with meatballs are salty, so you don't want to overdo it in your meatballs.
• If you want your meatballs to be sweeter, just add more ketchup.
• If you want your meatballs to have that pretty flash of green, add a tablespoon of parsley.
• You can do 3 tbs. of Italian seasoning mix instead of the oregano/basil/tarragon or thyme as listed.
• This is a "sniff and touch" recipe for my mom. You mostly want to make sure it smells like meatballs and feels like a meat play dough, smooth and elastic without being wet. If your recipe needs something else, you can tweak it.