The Great Spaghetti Caper

Summer is only halfway through, but this will be our last week to cook with the Breakfast Buddies.  Because we had done one week discussing salad, and one week with desserts, this last week we chose to do an entire meal, including elements that you might find in our container garden.  The peppers in the garden were not ready to be harvested, so that was talked about instead of including the ingredients in our meal.

Tuesday we started with making meatballs.  Meatballs are fun to make, you can get your hands messy and create.  Our meatball recipe came from the Betty Crocker cookbook, and involved baking the meatballs in the oven to prepare them for putting into spaghetti sauce.  The nice thing about this recipe is that the cooked meatballs can then be frozen in batches, ready to be pulled out of the freezer for a quick weeknight meal.

The meatballs contained ground beef (we used 90% beef), plain bread crumbs, Worcestershire sauce, milk, and eggs.  The meatballs were seasoned with dried minced onion and a small amount of salt.

First we washed hands with soap and water.  Reading through the cookbook recipe, we talked about meat safety, types of measurements, and doubling recipes.  Aida and Yaida cracked the eggs, added most of the ingredients, and mixed the meat and other items together with their clean hands before rolling the mixture into walnut sized balls and placing them in the disposable baking containers.

Once the meatballs were in the oven the dishes and our hands were washed and the table cleaned while we waited for them to bake.  The girls waited until the finished meatballs were cool before tasting one each.  When the meatballs were cool enough we covered them and put them into the refrigerator to wait until Thursday.