Chicken Wild Rice Meatballs

    Chicken wild rice soup is a staple in Minnesota. It’s creamy and comforting and it seems like every restaurant has it on their menu – especially in the fall. This recipe has my version of chicken wild rice soup topped with chicken wild rice meatballs.

    Chicken Wild Rice Meatballs

    Prep Time: 45 minutes
    Cook Time: 22 minutes
    Servings: 22 Meatballs
    Ahh, comfort food. There is something about the Midwest and Minnesota and comfort food. I have a feeling it’s because we have so many cold months here we need something to get us through. There’s nothing better than a nice warm bowl of Chicken Wild Rice Soup – well actually there is, it's the same soup with a bunch of meatballs in it!
    This recipe adds some hearty chicken meatballs with wild rice and mushrooms to the classic Midwestern soup. Wild rice is something that you’ll find all over the state and we have the good stuff here. Not that rock-hard black rice you are used to in the grocery store. Ours is brownish-gray and cooks in like a quarter of the time than the stuff you find in any old grocery store. Chicken, mushrooms, and wild rice are a classic combo in our midwestern state and I’m happy to share my meatball recipe as well as the classic chicken wild rice soup from where we live.
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    Ingredients

    Meatballs

    • 1 lb ground chicken
    • 1 1/2 cups Italian style breadcrumbs
    • 2 eggs
    • 1 cup cooked wild rice
    • 2 tbs butter
    • 1 – 8 oz package baby bella mushrooms minced
    • 1/2 small onion minced
    • 1/4 cup Whiskey – optional
    • salt & pepper to taste

    Chicken WIld Rice Soup

    • 8 cups chicken broth
    • 1 cup heavy cream
    • 2 – 8 oz packages Baby Bella mushroomed diced
    • 1 cup finely diced celery
    • 1 cup diced carrots
    • 1 small onion diced
    • 3 tbs butter
    • 1/2 cup dry white wine
    • 4 tbs flour
    • 1 tsp dried parsley
    • 1/2 tsp dried thyme
    • 1/2 tsp dried rosemary
    • 3 cups cooked wild rice
    • salt & pepper to taste

    Instructions

    • Preheat the oven to 350degrees Fahrenheit
    • In a sauce pan add the butter and heat it up until melted. Add the mushrooms and saute them until they release all their water. Add the minced onions and cook on high for 3-5 mins – making sure they don’t burn and stirring often. Add the whisky to the hot pan and cook until it’s burned off. Set the mushrooms aside to cool before adding to the meat mixture
    • In a bowl combine ground meat, breadcrumbs, eggs, sauteed mushrooms and onions, and wild rice. Season to taste salt and pepper.
    • Take a portion of the meat mixture and roll the meat mixture around in your hand to form a ball.
    • Place your meatballs on a greased baking sheet and place in the oven. Bake for 25 mins.
    • For the cream of chicken soup in a large pan sauté the mushrooms in butter. This should take about 5-7 mins.
    • Add the celery, carrots, and onions to the pan and sauté for another 5-7 mins.
    • Add the white wine to the pan and let it simmer until the liquid has evaporated. This should take another 5 mins.
    • Add the flour to the vegetables and stir it around to cover them for about 2-3 mins
    • Add the chicken broth, heavy cream, parsley, thyme, rosemary and wild rice. Salt and pepper to taste.
    • Let the soup simmer until you are ready to serve it. For this recipe I served my Chicken Wild Rice Meatballs on top of the soup. You can always add them in once they are cooked and serve them in the soup when you’re ready to eat.

    For this recipe I like to add mushrooms to the meat, mostly because I like to add mushrooms to most anything I cook. They are one of my favorite ingredients and you’ll see a lot of recipes on this site that have mushrooms in them. I use them so much that my husband says I should have stock in baby bella and portabella mushrooms. If you’re not a fan of mushrooms you can totally leave them out. Also if you’re not a fan of alcohol, like the whisky I use for the mushrooms or the white wine in the soup, you can totally omit those as well. I like the flavor whisky and sherry add to mushrooms, that’s why I deglaze the pan with it when I’m cooking. I either use whisky or sherry really mostly depending on what I have in the house. I’ll admit, we have whisky in the house almost all the time.

    The meatball mixture for this recipe is a little harder to work with because of the mushrooms covered in butter and the fact that we are using ground chicken. One helpful tip is to have some cooking spray near by that you can spray your hands with while rolling out the meatballs. The meatball mixture is going to feel a little loose, but don’t add more breadcrumbs unless you have a heavy and more dense meatball. If you add more breadcrumbs the meatballs will taste more like bread balls than meatballs.

    I always spray the foil that I put the meatballs on too with some cooking spray. I do this for all of my meatballs, even the beef ones that tend to let out a lot more grease in the cooking process. Ground chicken is so lean that you have to spray either the foil that you put them on or the baking dish you are using. That way they won’t stick to the pan and end up leaving half the meatball on the pan.

    The wild rice I used in this recipe is the stuff grown and harvested in Minnesota. It’s actually from a wild rice paddy that’s not too far away from our cabin. It’s more of a gray color and it cooks a lot quicker and it has a little different texture than traditional wild rice that you can find at any grocery store. I recently made some Minnesota Porcupine Meatballs with the black wild rice that you can find at the store because I was out of the stuff we get up north. I think those meatballs turned out great using the more common wild rice because it keeps a harder and chewier texture than the gray wild rice we have around here. No matter which kind you use these meatballs turn out great!

    You can serve these meatballs however you’d like. I decided for this particular recipe to have it be a two for one! I added the Chicken Wild Rice Soup recipe as a bonus Midwestern classic.  It’s a great way to serve the chicken wild rice meatballs on a chilly fall day or a chilly summer evening – we have those occasionally in Minnesota. You can also add these balls to the soup and keep it on the stove or throw it in a crockpot if you have family members that come home at different times or wanna eat at different times. This soup makes great leftovers too.

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