Meatballs are wonderful kid food! I make these meatballs in huge batches and keep them in the freezer. My children have enjoyed them since they first began to eat solid food. When they were very young, I added some milk and extra bread crumbs to make the meatballs very soft -- an excellent finger food for one-year-olds. Later, I sent a couple of cut-up meatballs as part of their lunch at their child care center. Now that they're older, they love them with pasta and sauce or in a meatball sub.
Ingredients
1 lb ground beef
2 medium onions, minced
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/2 cup bread crumbs
1 egg
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
(My daughter is picky about onion pieces in her food, so I will substitute a LOT of onion powder -- like 2 tbsp -- for the minced onions sometimes, or will puree the onions in a food processor. The onions are essential to the taste.)
Instructions:
Wash hands and set out two rimmed cookie sheets (very important to use cookie sheets with a rim, since the meatballs will release quite a bit of grease). Line cookie sheets with foil, if preferred. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Put all ingredients in a bowl and combine with your hands, thoroughly kneading until it's well mixed.
Roll meatballs (1 1/2 inches in diameter) in the palm of your hands and line up on cookie sheets. Meatballs will not expand so they can be placed very close to one another, to fit as many as possible on a cookie sheet.
Bake for 25 minutes.
These can be dropped directly into a pot of sauce, kept in the fridge, or put into a storage container and frozen.
I often make these with 5 lbs of meat (half ground beef and half ground turkey) so that I have plenty to freeze. When my children were young, I also pureed cooked vegetables (winter or summer squash, eggplant, peppers) and added them to the mixture to sneak some more veggies into their diet.
