Meatballs: Stretch that protein!

Meatballs.  Popular around the world, good as an appetizer, a perennial favorite for pasta, and available with a variety of seasonings and sauces.  Chances are, unless you're a vegetarian, you can find a meatball recipe that will appeal to you.  Personally, I'm partial to "porcupine meatballs", which include rice.  They were part of the inspiration for this recipe.  

I'm also a fan because they are a hands-on food.  I'm sure you can make meatballs without your hands, but it would be a horrific bother.  When I was a kid, helping my mom make meatballs was one of my favorite things.  I got to play with the food!

Yet another nice feature of meatballs is that they are best made with the cheapest, fattiest hamburger you can find.  Otherwise, they have a tendency to be dry.  Hooray for cheap meat!  Want to stretch your food budget even further?  How about incorporating another protein, such as lentils?  That's what I did here.

Lentil-meatballs

1 piece bread

1/4 lb hamburger

1/3 C cooked lentils, cooled

1 egg

2 tsp Worcestershire sauce

1 Tbsp Italian seasoning

2 Tbsp chopped onion

1 Tbsp (a hearty, 4-finger pinch) grated cheese

Salt and Pepper to taste

Before you get started, preheat your oven to 350˚F.

First, you're going to need to dry out your bread.  If you have stale bread sitting around, you're in luck and can probably skip this step.  If you don't, turn your oven on to the lowest temperature setting, and put the bread in for a few minutes.  In the meantime, you can get all your other ingredients together.  Just combine them in a bowl.  When the bread is dried out (or at least mostly so) crumble/tear it into the bowl with the other ingredients.  You want the pieces to be as small as possible, because you don't want a hunk of soggy bread in the middle of your meatball, but don't worry too much, because you're going to further mash it in a bit.  

Once all your ingredients are in a bowl, be sure you have clean hands (I'm everyone washes their hands before cooking anyway, but just to make extra-sure here.), reach in there, and sort of squeeze everything together.  Do this a few times, until everything is well-combined and homogenized.  Form into spheres and arrange on/in a baking pan.  Bake until the center of the meatballs are 170˚F (USDA recommendation).  Pick the largest meatball to be your tester, so you only have to poke holes in one of them.  

As you can see in the photo (left), they look a little funky after cooking-- the fat liquifies and solidifies, and it's not a pleasant thing to see.  Don't worry.  As you remove the meatballs from the pan, the nasty stuff wipes right off, and you'll be left with a presentable meatball.  That's the disadvantage to baking meatballs on their own.

I thought these turned out quite nicely.  I ate them over spaghetti squash (as you can see in the photo), and with pasta.  My fiancé ate them plain.  He said they were good, but he also asked why I always put weird things (like lentils) in my food.  So, taste-wise, I think they were a success.  However, the lentils remain obviously lentils, so they may not be the thing to serve a picky eater.  

Shepherdess Pie

After making runzas (see previous blog), I had some leftover filling to use up.  Oh, what to do with beef!? (So many options!)  I had some potatoes, too, so it looked like a variation on Shepherd's pie.  So, here's a version for one person, using pre-cooked meat.  Quick and easy.


Shepherdess Pie
~3/4 C leftover runza filling
1 potato
3 Tbsp half-and-half


Preheat your oven (or toaster oven, if you've got one of those) to 375˚F.

Peel and chop the potato, throw it in a pot, cover it with water, and add some salt.  Bring it to a boil and cook it until you can easily poke the potatoes with a fork.  (The amount of time with vary based on how  big the chopped potato pieces are.)  Drain the water, add the half-and-half, and mash the potato, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.  If you have some butter or margarine, it never hurts to throw that in, too, but you don't necessarily need it.

Put the leftover runza filling into a ramekin, and spoon the potato over the top, making sure to press it up against the rim, sealing a neat edge.  This is super-easy if you use a scraper (rubber spatula) to spoon the potatoes, because you can just drag it across the edge of the ramekin, both sealing the edge and getting all of the potato off the scraper.  Pop your ramekin into the oven for about 15 minutes, until the top is just slightly golden-brown, and everything is warmed through.  TA-DA!





It's been a while since I actually made the variant described and photographed here.  However, I do make little 1-person shepherd's pies fairly often.  Other variations to consider include cheesy potatoes, different veggies in with your beef, and the addition of seasonings, such as an Italian herb blend or a steak seasoning. Experiment; you only need at most 1/4 pound of hamburger.  
Also, if you have more leftover meat and/or a large potato, you may want to make 2 of these little pies.  You can keep them unbaked in the fridge, and then when you want to eat it, it only takes as long as you need to heat up your [toaster]oven and cook it.