{"id":1180,"date":"2010-12-20T21:22:10","date_gmt":"2010-12-21T04:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/?p=1180"},"modified":"2010-12-20T21:22:10","modified_gmt":"2010-12-21T04:22:10","slug":"the-meatball-recipe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2010\/12\/20\/the-meatball-recipe\/","title":{"rendered":"The Meatball Recipe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We had our annual holiday open house last Saturday.  That seems to deserve a blog post of its own, but for now, I want to get this out of the way&hellip;<\/p>\n<p>The most requested recipe by-far was for the meatballs that I made.  They were described as great comfort food, rustic, and &#8220;Filipino&#8221;. (Apparently, sweet + sour + meat = Filipino.)<\/p>\n<p>The whole thing can be made ahead and frozen.  For the open house, I froze the meatballs ahead (since they&#8217;re the time-consuming part) and made up the sauce the day before: that seemed to work pretty well.<\/p>\n<p>This recipe is very much from my childhood.  My mother made it quite often&mdash;I know it only has her recipe, although it may have come from a magazine or something.  It&#8217;s great with mashed potatoes. It travels well (to a potluck or whatever) in a slow cooker or casserole dish.<\/p>\n<h3>Meatballs<\/h3>\n<p>Really, any meatball recipe will do.  This is the one I used, but if you want to go with a fancy beef\/pork combo, that&#8217;s fine by me.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>1 lb ground beef<\/li>\n<li>1 clove minced garlic<\/li>\n<li>1\/2 cup breadcrumbs<\/li>\n<li>1\/4 cup milk<\/li>\n<li>1 egg<\/li>\n<li>1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce<\/li>\n<li>3\/4 tsp salt<\/li>\n<li>1\/2 tsp pepper<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ol>\n<li>Preheat oven to 400&deg;F.<\/li>\n<li>In a large bowl, mix ingredients together.  Roll into inch balls: I like one inch for appetizers, but bigger if I&#8217;m serving it as a meal.<\/li>\n<li>Place on a rimmed baking sheet and bake until lightly browned and cooked through: 15&ndash;25 minutes, depending on the size of the balls.  Or you could cook them in a saut&eacute; pan if you&#8217;re impatient.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h3>Sauce<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>1 large onion, roughly chopped into strips\/chunks<\/li>\n<li>1 tbsp butter<\/li>\n<li>2 cups ketchup<\/li>\n<li>2\/3 cup brown sugar (or 1 cup if you want it a little sweeter)<\/li>\n<li>2 tbsp cider vinegar (or wine vinegar)<\/li>\n<li>1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce<\/li>\n<li>salt and pepper to taste<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ol>\n<li>Saut&eacute; the onion in butter until softened.<\/li>\n<li>Combine the other ingredients.  Add the onions when they are cooked.<\/li>\n<li>Combine the sauce and meatballs in a casserole dish.  Bake at 350&deg;F for about an hour, stirring halfway through.  They&#8217;re done when the sauce is bubbling nicely.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>For the open house, I did the last step in a slow cooker: just combined the sauce and meatballs in the slow cooker about 4 hours ahead and let it do its thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We had our annual holiday open house last Saturday. That seems to deserve a blog post of its own, but for now, I want to get this out of the way&hellip; The most requested recipe by-far was for the meatballs that I made. They were described as great comfort food, rustic, and &#8220;Filipino&#8221;. (Apparently, sweet [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1180"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1189,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions\/1189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}