Last Minute Ideas

Last night I was exhausted. We had been on a 3-hour mountain bike ride earlier, which capped off 3 days off riding, plus work, etc. I was tired. For dinner I had planned a very simple pasta sauce of tomato sauce, garlic, ricotta cheese, and grilled artichokes (the jarred ones). Then I made the mistake of watching the Food Network before dinner. Tom whats-his-face from "The Next Food Network Star" has this show called "Outrageous Food," and he was talking to a guy about a gigantic meatball sub. Suddenly I wanted meatballs. I've been trying to limit meat to one meal a day, and since I hadn't had any yesterday I figured why not? I thought about it for a few minutes and came up with these little beauties (sorry, these were the only ones left after last night!)

Yummy chicken meatballs!

Here's what I did with full and complete disclosure:  I make my own ranch dressing.  I'd made some in the food processor before making the chicken meatballs and thought I don't think I'll rinse that.  So my chicken got mixed with the ranch herbs of parsley, garlic, chives and onion powder from the get-go.  But I digress... Ok, so I thawed 2 chicken breasts and chopped them into like bite-sized pieces.  I put one chopped chicken breast in the food processor and added 2 cloves garlic and about 2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley.  I pulsed that until everything was blended and the chicken was chopped pretty fine.  Then I scraped that into a bowl and pulsed up the second chicken breast.   I scraped that into the bowl with the other chicken mixture.  Then I added 1 egg, about 3/4 cup of bread crumbs, and about 1/4 cup of parmesan cheese.  I mixed all this up with my hands and then started making meatballs. 

I used a round pizza pan but any cookie sheet will do.  I lined mine with aluminum foil and sprayed it with olive oil.  My meatballs were roughly golf-ball sized...maybe a little bigger.  I just worked the mixture into a sort-of ball shape and dropped it on the pan.  Nothing more.  I was able to get 9 big meatballs out of the mix.

I at first cooked the meatballs with the broiler on low...and my top oven shelf is about in the middle of the oven, not the very top.  After about 10-12 minutes I kicked the broiler up to high and let the meatballs cook for another 2-3 minutes.  Watch closely so they don't burn!  Mine were done at this point.  I cut one in half to check and then used a meat thermometer to make sure they were at 165F in the middle. 

I served mine alongside my pasta, but today I had one on a salad and that was good too.  These would be super tasty for meatball subs!