Bring on the meatballs!

I seem to have fallen in love with meatballs these past couple of months.  I really wanted to make them but didn't want pasta since we had already eaten a lot of pasta that week so instead, I decided to make sandwiches.  I've made these meatballs before but I changed a couple of things so the sauce would be a little different.  The sauce and meatballs are from scratch and I definitely think there's a difference between store bought and homemade.

The ingredients I used were:

ground beef

salt

pepper

parmesan cheese

garlic powder

onion

egg

garlic

parsley

bay leaf

breadcrumbs

whole canned roma tomatoes

tomato sauce

basil

crushed red pepper

So I started with the sauce since I wanted it to cook for a few hours.  I chopped up the onions and garlic and let them cook down in a pan until it softened a bit but not too soft.  Then, I added the tomato sauce and tomatoes.  For the tomatoes, I put them in a bowl first and crushed them with my hands.  The parmesan cheese, bay leaf, parsley, crushed red pepper, and basil were also added and then mixed the entire thing.  The sauce was heated until it got bubbly then the heat was turned down to low and allowed to simmer. 

Next, I mixed and formed the meatballs.  I put the beef in a bowl and added garlic powder, parmesan cheese, breadcrumbs, an egg, basil, and oregano.  Then I formed them to be about the size of my palm. They were carefully dropped into the sauce and covered the pan.  These cooked for about 3 hours.

The spooned the sauce over the meatballs so they were covered and I made sure to stir them around every so often just so nothing was sticking to the bottom of the pan.

Once they were done, I put them on some buns with some mozzerella cheese and cut up pepperoncinis.

 

These were pretty delicious.  The cheese topping made them perfect for me.  I think these are a really good substitute when you're in the mood for Italian or pizza b/c they really have all the elements of both but in sandwich form.  They are super hot though so make sure to let them cool a bit before biting into them.  It can be difficult b/c the house smells soooo good after 3 hours of cooking and by then you should be pretty hungry.  I put 4 meatballs on each sandwich and ended up with 5 leftover which made for good leftovers later.  Unfortunately, I couldn't eat them due to my teeth being pulled but Eric was gracious enough to eat them in my place :)