Receipe Review: Porcupine Meatballs

I'm not really a fan of either corned beef or cabbage, so *that* wasn't happening  at our house on St. Patrick's Day! BTW, Mr. Mamie claims never to have heard of corned beef and cabbage as a "traditional St. Patrick's Day meal." What's up with that? And yes I know, probably no one in Ireland eats corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day, but here in the U.S of A. it seems to be "traditional,"  at least according to the recipes that abound on morning news shows and in the blogosphere.

Yeah, so, what to fix on March 17th? When I was making the menu plan last weekend I took great delight in the fact that the coming week was Spring Break, which would allow me some extra time to cook new and/or more time-consuming recipes.  I had been wanting to make these Porcupine Meatballs from Kate at Cooking During Stolen Moments FOH-EH-VAH and this week seemed like the perfect opportunity.

This morning I cooked up a vast batch of rice using Lundberg organic brown short-grain rice (purchased in bulk from Costco). By vast I mean 6 cups DRY, which yielded almost 12 cups cooked. The rice was also being used to make some freezer burritos, which I will be posting about later.  I cooked the rice in beef broth, which gives it a richer flavor.

After letting the rice cool down, I measured six cups into a big plastic bowl and added two cups of shredded sharp cheddar cheese. The recipe alone sounded good enough that I went ahead and planned to make it double-sized so that there'd be plenty for the freezer! Next came a pound of ground beef and the seasonings. I had some doubts about the rice-to-meat ratio, but with the cheese added in it came together perfectly. Just the aroma of the mixture was making my mouth water!

With the amounts of raw ingredients I got right around 52 meatballs. I put 30 on a tray to flash-freeze, which will  be transferred to a Ziploc bag for baking later (should be two meals for three of us, or one meal if the kids are here too).  The remaining meatballs went on another tray and into the fridge until time to bake them for dinner. It was GREAT to have the main dish all prepped early in the day!

I baked the refrigerated meatballs for 35 minutes and the meat seemed to be done. They smelled delicious while cooking, and held their shape perfectly (I think refrigerating helped this aspect). They wanted to stick a little to the foil-lined cookie sheet, so I need to make sure to grease it really well next time.

Mr. Mamie, GrandmaT, and I all LOVED these meatballs, and I am sure that the kids would too.  They had a savory taste and nice texture, and I like that there's so much healthy brown rice in them. Definitely a HIT and a KEEPER!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)