Erica has been asking me for a few weeks if we could please have spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. I haven’t made meatballs in a VERY long time because when it comes to cooking with meat, I’m cheap and I hate making things that call for lots and lots of meat. But, ever trying to please my family at dinnertime, I decided to look around a bit and see if I could find a good "meatball" solution. I know wheat can be used as a meat extender, so I searched online and found this recipe for meatballs.
While I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call them "the best" like the name states, they were pretty good and Erica was very pleased, polishing off at least 4 meatballs. Isaac (who is not really a big meat eater) ate half of one and announced he didn’t really want a meatball after all, and Cambria ate a few bites of hers before starting a food fight with the kitchen floor. Kimball said he liked them "as long as you know to expect the wheat," but I didn’t really notice it. I think probably had I used cracked bulgur he would have noticed it less, but since I tried and failed to crack my (homemade) bulgur, we just used it whole.
Ok – as promised, here are the modifications I made to the recipe: it calls for 4 oz of ground beef and 4 oz of Italian sausage – I used 8 oz of ground beef, as my family isn’t fond of Italian sausage and I didn’t have any on hand. I used 1 whole egg instead of 2 egg whites (using just the whites would have been healthier, but I hate to waste the yolks because I’d just have to trash them). I used 1/3 cup wheat berries to make bulgur so we ended up with a bit more bulgur (and I decided to use it all in the recipe). I also used more hot water (and actually boiled the water and bulgur rather than just letting them soak). Instead of whole wheat bread crumbs I opened up the freezer and found a bag of 4 1/2 hot dog buns and another bag containing 1 hamburger bun that we’ll probably never use. I tore those up and dried them out a bit after defrosting, and made bread crumbs out of that. Seemed to work pretty well, though it made 2 cups of crumbs so I think I’ll try and make another batch of meatballs this week and freeze them for another day.
