Super Easy Venison Meatballs
I don’t know about your kids, but mine LOVE spaghetti. Spaghetti night is one of the few nights when everyone eats happily with no complaining over the menu. As of now, Ragu makes a sauce called Super Chunky Mushroom that doesn’t bother my onion sensitivity. Prego also makes a Sensitive sauce that contains no onions or garlic. We all find that one too sweet for pasta, but it makes an amazing pizza sauce (no I can’t order pizza either). I am still working on perfecting my homemade sauce recipe and will post that when I finish it. That will have to wait until my tomatoes are ready in the summer though. 😉
**Update – My tomatoes came in, and I have finally come up with a great spaghetti sauce recipe. Find it here.
Sometimes we have our sauce meatless or with ground sausage, but the kids’ favorite is with meatballs. Of course, I have to make my own, because the world thinks that onions are necessary ingredients in almost everything.
Here is my super easy venison meatball recipe. This yielded about 72 golf ball-sized meatballs.
Ingredients:
- 4 lbs ground venison
- 2 lbs of raw breakfast sausage (the kind in the roll that you can usually find near bacon at the store)
- I have found that Kroger’s Mild and Tennessee Pride’s Mild are both safe for me.
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 350° F.
- Line the bottom pan of 1-2 large baking sheets with sides with parchment paper – you need something with sides to keep the juices from running out.
- Mix the 2 ground meats together until they are well mixed . I typically just use my hands.
- Pull out golf ball sized pieces of the meat mixture and form into balls, placing them side by side on the tray of the baking sheet.
- You can make these bigger or smaller depending on how you like your meatballs. Just be sure to adjust the cooking time.
- Feel free to crowd them a bit. They will shrink a little when you cook them so you don’t have to worry about them sticking together.
- Once the tray is full, place it in the oven.
- Bake for about 12-15 min or until done. Use a meat thermometer to be sure that the middle of the meatballs reaches at least 170° F.
- Allow to cool, then vacuum seal in bags. Label and freeze. Enjoy in the next 6-12 months.
- I usually put about 12 in each bag.
- This makes a super easy weeknight dinner. In the morning, I just dump a bag of frozen meatballs into a crockpot with 2 jars of sauce. I set it to low until lunch then turn it down to keep warm until dinner. All I have to do is cook some pasta and slice some veggies or make a salad, and dinner is done! 🙂
Recent Comments