Last year at knitting class, my student brought me a turkey meatball she had made from a Martha Stewart recipe. I knew it would be good because, much as I don't care for Martha Stewart, I have to admit the woman has some good recipes. And it was good. Tender, juicy, and full of flavor. So I asked for the recipe and my student brought me a copy she downloaded from Martha's website.I finally got around to making it earlier this winter. I defrosted a pound of ground turkey I had bought a month or so earlier, chopped up all of the ingredients and mixed them all together. I rolled out the meatballs, cooked them in the skillet, and dropped them in some sauce. The original recipe calls for them to be served over spaghetti squash, but I just wasn't in a spaghetti squash kind of mood. If you must know the truth, I have never been in a spaghetti squash kind of mood, and I suspect I never will be. At least not to be used instead of spaghetti. I would be curious to try it to see what it is like, but I have no desire to serve it with turkey meatballs in tomato sauce. I thought they might be rather nice with polenta.
And they were, overall, but there are a few things I have learned from this experience. I will share those things with you in case you should decide to try your hand at making these delicious little things, so you will not make the same mistakes I made, and which I hope I will never make again.
1. Make you sure you mix everything together well. I didn't realize until it was too late, but I did not get all of the ingredients incoroporated properly into the meat. It was partly because I didn't want to overwork the meat, but it was mostly because of:
2. Be sure you defrost your meat long enough before you are going to make the meatballs that it isn't hand-numbingly cold when you are trying to mix everything together, so you can mix it thoroughly without feeling like your hands are going to fall off.
3. Make the sauce that comes with the recipe, or some other tomato-based sauce that you like. Do not use the leftover Tomato Bread Soup you made too much of a couple of days before. It is too thick and bready to make a decent sauce and it will conflict with the pasta or polenta that you serve with it.
Other than that, enjoy! These little meatballs are bursting with juice and flavor.
You can find the recipe here. Other than using a completely different sauce and omitting the spaghetti squash completely, I followed it as written.
2 comments:
i had to laugh, after i read this, it is like what not to do......
:)
when me and my mom made this, we ate the meatballs with reg. pasta.
This is what I meant when I said mine came out differently from yours. But even with all that, they were fantastic and I will definitely make them again - with pasta - and a better sauce :)
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