Recipe : Mozzarella Stuffed Meatballs

This shouldn't come as a surprise but we're big on football in this house.  Typically once football season rolls around, Sunday nights usually mean pizza for dinner but we had some friends over to watch the game recently and I decided we should do something a little different for food.  (So while I wrote all the ingredients and directions down on a piece of paper, I cannot for the life of me remember where I found the link.)  The husband pointed out the recipe for Mozzarella Stuffed Meatballs looking mighty fine so that's what we did!

Can we discuss the amazingness that are slow cooker bags?  Discovered these things recently (yes, I'm slow to the game) and they're so awesome!  I'm no longer gagging while I clean the overnight soaked remnants out anymore.  Moving on!

Mozzarella Stuffed Meatballs Recipe

Ingredients

• Fresh mozzarella (I used a 'brick', for lack of a better term, that was about 7-8 inches long and that was definitely too much.  I had way more mozzarella than meat.
• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 pound Italian sausage
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp pepper
• 1 cup bread crumbs
• 1/4 C Parmesan.  Use the shredded or flaked Parmesan, not the powdered canister kind...you know which kind I'm talkin' 'bout ;)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 C milk
• 1/2 C parsley
• Jar of spaghetti sauce.  I used the homestyle marinara by Emeril.

Directions

• Cut the mozzarella into roughly 1" cubes.
• Put the remaining ingredients all into a large bowl.
•  Combine with your hands.  Yes, it's kinda gross.  You could probably use a mixer to do this but I went the old fashioned 'by hand' route.
• Form the meat mixture into about plum size meatballs.  Take a cube of mozzarella and sort of smoosh it into the middle of a meatball and bring the edges back over it so it still looks like a meatball.
• Put a layer of sauce on the bottom of the crock pot and then add a layer of meatballs.  Keep doing this until you've used all your meatballs: sauce, meatballs, sauce, meatballs.  Et cetera ad nauseum.
• Cover the crock pot and cook on high for 2 - 2.5 hours.  

I ate mine plain but the husband cooked up a little spaghetti to go with his.  Either way, these things are tha bomb.  Enjoy!

Quick Dinner Recipe : Margherita Naan

I'm all for dinner recipes that are quick, easy and taste good.  I really don't want to be spending over an hour getting something ready to eat unless it's a special occasion like Christmas or Easter.  Like the time I spend THREE hours trying to make a PF Chang's recipe for dinner.  Yeah, that's not happening again in this lifetime.

We have naan pizzas on regular rotation for dinners around here.  Usually it's a pepperoni and mozzarella naan but I decided to change it up a bit this time with a margherita recipe.  Whoa...gettin' crazy over here I know.  I perused handy ol' Pinterest and came across some varieties I liked and got to work.

We buy the Stonefire mini naans from Costco.  There's 18 in a pack for around $5-6.  It's a screaming deal considering our local grocery store sells a 2 pack for $3.  I'll let you do the math on that one.

Here's the deets:

Mini Margherita Naan Pizza

Ingredients

• mini naan pizzas
• olive oil
• fresh mozzarella (the kind that's in containers in liquid; usually in the deli area)
• fresh basil
• tomatoes  

Directions

• Preheat oven to 400 degrees
• Brush each naan with olive oil.

 

• Chop fresh basil into strips
• Slice tomatoes thinly.  You don't want the tomatoes to be as thick as the kind you put on burgers.
• Slice the mozzarella. 

• Place mozzarella down first on the naan, followed by tomatoes and basil.

• Bake in the oven for 9-10 minutes and when you pull these bad boys out, you're going to wish you'd probably baked like a dozen more.  

The fresh basil on these is what makes these so super yummy!  You can never have too much basil in my opinion ;)

Homemade Protein Bars Recipe

I'm always on the hunt for healthy, tasty and easy to make snacks for the whole family.  Sometimes healthy and tasty don't always go hand in hand so when I find a recipe that not only makes my taste buds do a dance but also is on the healthier end of snacks, I'm pumped.  These protein bars have been on repeat for the last couple weeks and it's always a mad dash for the last one in the fridge!

Homemade Protein Bars
Ingredients

• 2 cups Rice Krispies
• 1 cup dried cranberries
• 1 cup coconut flakes
• 1/2 cup chia seeds
• 1/2 cup sunflower seeds
• 1 cup peanut butter (can substitute sun or soy butter if you have a nut allergy)
• 1/2 cup honey
• 1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
• 8 teaspoons butter

Instructions

• In large bowl combine together the Rice Krispies, cranberries, pumpkin seeds and coconut.

• In a saucepan over medium-low heat, stir together peanut butter, butter, honey and brown sugar until they melt.  Stir continually.  Don't let them boil or the sugars will harden.

• Add peanut butter mixture/sauce to dry ingredients and stir until well combined.
• Add in the chia seeds and stir again.  I add the chia seeds here instead of at the beginning as they tend to settle at the bottom of the bowl and you have them all sitting at the bottom of the bars and not dispersed evenly.
• Press firmly into an 8x8 pan.

• Refrigerate until set.
• Cut into squares and keep in a ziploc bag or tupperware container.
• Enjoy! 

Yummy Fall Pumpkin Glazed Cookies

So it's no big shocker that fall, and all things fall, kinda get me all jazzed up.  Throw in temps in the 50's (like they're supposed to be) and I'm set.  It was the perfect morning yesterday to hit up the local pumpkin patch but the heavy rains the day before kept it from opening so I decided that getting our fall fix at the grocery store would have to do.

We hadn't even actually made it into the main part of the store before it looked like fall had thrown up in our cart...your normal, run-of-the-mill pumpkins for carving, fat squatty Cinderella pumpkins for our front porch fall display, apple cider.  I think you're getting the drift here.  Oh, and I can't forget the massive straw bale in the back of my vehicle for the aforementioned front porch display.  I'd found a couple recipes online that I wanted to try and of course, I needed some pumpkin puree for them.  As much as I wanted to go all nuts and whip out every pumpkin recipe I had, I decided to start with the Pumpkin Glazed Cookies and they don't disappoint.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup softened butter
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup pumpkin puree {canned pumpkin}
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 large eggs
4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (I added a little extra...can't have too much pumpkin pie spicyness!)

Glaze
3 cups powdered sugar
4 tablespoons water
1/4 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (again, 1/4tsp didn't seem like quite enough)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with wax/parchment paper.  This kinda goes against what the recipe says but I used my KitchenAid mixer to mix everything together instead of doing it by hand.  It does a better job of mixing things and is faster at it so that's a no brainer.  I combined the butter, oil, pumpkin, sugars, vanilla and eggs first. Then I added the dry remaining dry ingredients.  Go slow with the mixing because the bowl will be full and you don't want to be cleaning it off the counters and floors!  I used an ice cream scoop to scoop out the 'batter' onto the baking sheet and then flatten to 1/2 inch thick using the bottom of a glass. Bake 8 minutes.

Go ahead and mix the the glaze ingredients while the cookies are baking since this only takes a couple minutes.  Once you pull each batch of cookies out, let them cool a couple minutes on the baking sheet before moving to a cooling rack or, if you're like me and have a too small cooling rack, a long piece of foil on the counter.  Take spoon and kinda joosh and smear (yes, those are technical terms) glaze over each warm cookie.  Let the glaze harden on the cookies at least a couple hours before moving them to wherever you plan on storing them: cookie jar, container, cookie jar, etc. 

Try not to eat them all at once and enjoy!