Best Meatballs EVER, plus a secret ingredient…

If you are a follower of this particular blog you probably think we had steak for dinner on Father’s Day. I totally intended to make the steak but when Daddy Chaos got to pick dinner on his special day he decided he wanted spaghetti and meatballs. Not just any spaghetti and meatballs-he wanted to make a spaghetti and meatballs recipe that was just ours, not my mother’s and not his mother’s. So I picked this recipe posted by Elise at Simply Recipes. Let me tell you, these really are the best meatballs. The step of de-glazing the pan with wine as we were finishing off the meatballs gives them a delicious syrupy red wine glaze. The fresh herbs and mushrooms combined with the sausage was amazing. I used spicy Italian sausage because that’s all the grocery had, and we might consider adding a little more beef next time because the sausage flavor was very pronounced (but only in the best way). We didn’t have a Chianti (our first choice for spaghetti sauce) on hand so we picked another Italian wine: Layer Cake Primitivo. It went perfectly. The recipe itself requires quite a bit of prep work and after chopping and dicing onions, garlic, basil, parsley, and mushrooms, for the sauce and then again for the actual meatballs, I still needed:

1 cup very finely chopped carrots.

At this point I was starting to get a lot of “when’s dinner?” “can I have noodles with no sauce?” “can I have fruit snacks?” So you know what I did? Trust me when I say it’s not only ingenuity but laziness, I just used this:

This is what happens to fancy recipes when I get a hold of them.