Meatballs with tomato sauce
Meatballs with passata (polpette al sugo) is a typical Italian dish. My grandma would make these year round, but I love having this dish when the weather gets chilly... Source the best quality ingredients and you won't be able to resist this extremely tasty dish!
Recipe for 24 meatballs:
220 gr of ground veal ( or ground beef)
160 gr of sausage
25 gr grated Parmesan cheese
30 gr of bread
1 egg
1 tablespoon of fresh minced parsely
salt and pepper
2 tablespoons of milk
extra virgin olive oil
Recipe for the sauce:
350 gr of passata*
1 teaspoon of oregano
1 teaspoon of salt
Place bread in a bowl with some milk for a few seconds, remove and squeeze to get excess milk out of the bread; break it up in small chunks.
Open up the sausages and remove the casing. Break the meat up with your hands and place in a bowl; add the ground meat (veal or beef) bread, cheese, parsely and the egg. Mix everything up with your hands, adding salt and pepper as needed.
Once everything has been mixed up together, you can start taking little bits of meat and roll them up with your hands creating small balls. You can lay them on a baking tray while you are working on the other balls. Once all the mixture has been used, heat up 2 tablespoons of olive oil on medium high heat and drop your meatballs in the pan. Cook on both sides for 5 minutes and add passata. Add a pinch of salt and cook for another 20-25 minutes on medium heat. Serve with some fresh bread. Italians do "scarpetta" (which literally translates to small shoe) with the sauce: once the meatballs are finished and the sauce is left on the plate, we mop up all that delicious tomato sauce with bread!
Tips:
* you can find passata at Whole Foods or any Mediterranean food stores
You can store cooked meatballs in the fridge for 3 days
You can freeze cooked or uncooked meatballs for 1 month. In order to do so, make sure all your ingredients are fresh and were not previously frozen.
If you'd like you could add some Pecorino (you can find it at Whole Foods or Les Amis du Fromage) on top of Parmesan - Pecorino is a pretty strong cheese, so it'd give this dish a nice kick!
