Paleo Beef and Lamb Meatballs with goat cheese

My hubby is Italian, meaning that before we went paleo, he LOVED eating a big bowl of pasta with meat sauce, lasagna, ravioli, or any other form of pasta.  I loved it too, but we made a choice to change our eating habits.  One of the good things, though, is that meatballs are still a delicious paleo treat!  I just decided to get a bit creative.  Instead of serving the meatballs over spaghetti squash (which is definitely a yummy alternative), I served these over a bed of sauteed spinach.  I also made a cream sauce rather than a marinara sauce.  My little baby is still growing and needs the grass fed, full fat dairy, so I added a bit with the goat cheese and the cream sauce.  To make these "true paleo," just make a different sauce and don't add in the goat cheese.

Paleo Beef and Lamb Meatballs

 with Goat Cheese

* 1 lb ground beef

* 1 lb ground lamb

* 1 cup minced onions

* 2 egg whites

* 3 tbs minced garlic

* 1 tbs parsley flakes

* 1 tsp salt

* 1 tsp pepper

* 1 tbs garlic powder

* 1 tbs onion powder

* 8 oz goat cheese (optional)

For the sauce

* 1 pint heavy cream

* 1 tsp salt

* 1 tsp pepper

* 1 tbs garlic powder

* 1/2 cup parmesan cheese (grated)

First, I mixed pretty much everything up in a big glass bowl.  I mixed the ground beef, lamb (I like the taste of both mixed together, but you can certainly change it up with pork or just using all lamb or all beef... whatever you like). I also added in the onions, garlic, spices, and egg whites.  You could also use a whole egg, but I had egg whites that I needed to use. I just used my hands and mixed everything up.  Make sure not to work the mixture too much because the last thing you want is the meat turning rubbery and tough.

Most people add some sort of breadcrumb, white bread soaked in milk, or some other jazz... I've made several batches of meatballs without them and really haven't missed them.  These are moist enough without having to add bread to make them soft.

Once everything was thoroughly mixed, I took the goat cheese and put it into a small dish, getting it ready to stuff these bad little meatballs!  Like I said before, if you don't do well with dairy or don't like it, then just leave this part out.  The meatballs will still be delicious without the goat cheese.  You could probably use a different type of cheese here too.  Those little buccatini (mozzarella balls) would be perfect for this! I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but now I want to try it... I'll save that for another post, though!

Next, I took a small bit of goat cheese and rolled it into a little ball. 

Then, I took a pretty good amount of the meat mixture, rolled it into a ball, then flattened it so the goat cheese ball would fit in the middle.  

 Next, I put the goat cheese ball in the middle of the meat mixture.  I then wrapped the meat mixture around the goat cheese.  You have to make sure that there is enough meat to cover the whole thing because you don't want the goat cheese to melt and leak out of the meatball when you cook it.

I just repeated this process until I was out of goat cheese and meat mixture.  I lined them all up on a foil lined cookie sheet to get all situated.   

These meatballs turned out to be HUGE, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. 

You can bake these in the oven, but I like mine browned on the stove.  I didn't even need to add any butter or oil to the pan because the meat had enough.  I just turned the stove to Medium High and threw in a few meatballs at a time.  I let them brown and kept moving them so they would cook evenly and not burn.

 So here are the yummy little meatballs, just waiting to be eaten.

As I mentioned before, I served these over a bed of sauteed spinach.  I just threw the fresh spinach in the same pan that I cooked the meatballs.  That way, it didn't need any oil or butter.  It just cooked in the leftover juices from the meatballs.... talk about delicious flavor!

Here's what they look like with the cream sauce.  If you want to make the sauce, it's super easy.  Basically, you put the heavy cream, parmesan cheese, garlic powder, salt, and pepper in a small saucepan and heat everything on Medium heat.  Keep stirring it all so that the sauce won't burn on the bottom (which can happen quickly if you aren't careful).  Eventually, the cheese melts and you have a yummy alfredo sauce that is amazing with the spinach and the meatballs.

I loved this dish.  It was delicious and it was relatively simple.  The best thing about this is that you can double or triple the batch of meatballs and freeze them before you cook them.  Our little Peanut is due to arrive in two weeks (so any time now).  I'm planning to make a batch of these suckers and freeze them so we'll have some food during those first few hectic weeks. 

Enjoy,

Jenn 

Turkey Cutlets

Ever since reading an article about how many chemicals and artificial hormones and junk is fed to poultry and beef, I've been trying to buy organic meats. It's tough to shop organic... there isn't much of a selection and the prices are higher than non-organic meat... but it's our health we're talking about, so I figure it's worth the expense.  Sometimes, though, I can't always find organic, so I go for the "natural" brand... it's not classified as organic, but they are more stringent in their requirements that the farmers can't use certain artificial hormones or chemicals... and that's how we come to this posting. 

I was shopping at our friendly local grocery store and found some Nature's Promise turkey cutlets.  The package said 99% fat free... not too bad, huh?  I didn't really have much of an idea of what I would do with them, but I threw them in my cart.  I perused my fav food websites and decided that I would just make up a recipe (surprise, surprise).  I decided on Italian breaded turkey cutlets. 

I made this on a weeknight, when I didn't have much time to cook, so I cheated and used store bought pasta sauce... but hey, I decided it was worth it to go to the gym and use store bought sauce rather than skip the gym and make the sauce from scratch. So here you have: Turkey Cutlets!

 

The ingredients are pretty simple

* 1 lb whole grain angel hair pasta

* 3/4 cup whole grain bread crumbs (I make these myself, regular breadcrumbs would work just fine)

*1/3 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

* 1 lb thinly sliced turkey cutlets

* 1 tbs dried oregano

*1 tbs dried basil

*2 tbs canola oil
*2 tsp garlic powder

* 1 jar of your fav pasta sauce

First, on a plate, you mix the breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese, basil, oregano, and garlic powder.  Over medium heat, add the canola oil to a saucepan and let heat.  While waiting for the oil to come to temperature, take each individual turkey cutlet and cover them in the breadcrumb mixture.

Breading the turkey cutlet

Typically, you want to have 1 "wet hand" and 1 "dry hand."  This means that you use one hand to touch the raw turkey and turn it over, and you want to use the other hand to cover the turkey with the breadcrumbs.  By using this method, your hands don't get as messy as they could if you used both hands to do both jobs.

Once the oil has heated thoroughly, gently place the breaded turkey cutlet in the pan. 

 

waiting to get nice and brown

You want to make sure the temperature isn't too high, or the outside breading will brown too quickly and the inside will stay raw.  You also want to make sure that you don't crowd the pan, if you add too much meat to the pan, it will lower the temperature of your oil, which will result in your food not turning a lovely brown color.  Luckily the first scenario isn't much of a problem, since the turkey cutlets are really thin, it doesn't take long for them to cook the whole way through.  When you notice the bottom start to brown up, flip them.  Don't flip them too many times though.  I'm not sure if this is an actual strategy... but I try to only flip the meat once, rather than flipping them over and over again.  Once both sides are nice and brown, remove the cutlet to a plate lined with a paper towels.  This allows the excess oil to drain from the turkey cutlet, allowing it to remain as crispy and crunchy as possible.

 

just draining the excess oil

While I was cooking the turkey cutlets in batches, I heated up the pasta water and cooked the angel hair (whole grain, of course).  I also heated the pasta sauce over the stove.  I added some random spices and herbs to the sauce to give it a bit of flair... I always add at least 1 extra ingredient to pasta sauce to make me feel like I helped make it taste better. :) 

Once the pasta was done, I piled it on a plate and topped it with a large amount of pasta sauce -Curt LOVES lots of sauce on his food, no matter what it is.  Then I added a few cutlets of turkey (they were small, so 3 worked pretty well).  Then, just for good measure, I grated just a bit more parmesan cheese to dust over the top of the dish.

 

nice, homecooked meal

Voila!  The food was great!  Curt loved it and had seconds... a sure sign he really liked the food.  He seemed to really enjoy it and I wrapped up the rest for lunches for the rest of the week. 

Overall, I think this was a great dish... it was relatively simple and it had a lot of flavor to it.  I'll definitely be adding this to my repertoire of recipes!

 

Delish!

Stay tuned... remember my last posting about trying random recipes from the Martha Stewart Cookbook?  Yesterday, I opened to a random page and had 3 recipes to choose from... I decided on Pastitsio... I'm not really sure what it is, but it involves ground lamb and elbow macaroni... I plan on making it on Wednesday night for date night with the hubs!