We had to plan a quick meal for friends and their children for Saturday night.  We checked some recipes, and headed to the market (Martin’s supermarket), where we happily found a 1 lb. ground beef/veal/pork blend called “Meatloaf Blend” in the butcher section.  This was a very happy discovery, because otherwise we would have had to buy separate 1 lb. packages of ground meat and combine them, and we would have had lots of leftovers!

For our meatballs recipe, we started with Betty Crocker’s Easy Meatballs recipe, and we also borrowed from an Italian-American Meatballs recipe on allrecipes.com.  We made just a couple easy tweaks to the combined recipes:

1. Rather than use 80% lean ground beef, we used the grocery store butcher’s Meatloaf Blend 1 lb. package (ground veal/beef/pork).

2. When blending the ground meat and ingredients, we added finely chopped garlic and parsely, and

3. We made our own inexpensive bread crumbs in the food processor with some slightly stale sesame sourdough that worked perfectly.

Our meatballs stuck a little to our baking pan, this could have been avoided with a little cooking spray, and perhaps rolling our meatballs around once during cooking to allow for even results :^)

Our Saturday night easy meal for friends: Sun Dried Tomato Linguine (Farfalle (bow-tie pasta) for the kids) with Marinara and homemade meatballs, Potato Soup, fruit salad and the ubiquitous bacon crumbles as a garnish.

Freakybites Mini Toasted Italian Meatball Sandwiches on Italian Bread