Cottage Pie Meatballs
Cottage Pie Meatballs
Ingredients
Meatballs
- 1 lb Jimmy Dean’s sausage
- 1/2 lb ground beef
- 1 cup Italian Style breadcrumbs
- 2 eggs
- salt & pepper to taste
- 21 frozen mashed potato pucks
Cottage Pie Gravy Ingredients
- 1 8 oz package baby bella mushrooms
- 1 small onion minced
- 3 small garlic cloves minced
- 1/3 cup dry sherry – optional
- 3 tbs butter
- 2 cups beef broth
- 1 1/2 tbs flour
Instructions
For the Meatballs
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
- In a bowl combine ground meat, breadcrumbs, eggs, sautéed mushrooms and season to taste salt and pepper.
- Take the meat mixture and flatten it in your hand. Take one of the frozen mashed potato pucks and place it in the middle of the meat mixture. Wrap the meat around the frozen mashed potato puck and roll it into the shape of a ball.
- Place your meatballs on a greased baking sheet. Bake for 25 mins.
For the Gravy
- Dice the 8 oz package of mushrooms into cubes. In a sauté pan melt the butter on high and add the mushrooms to sauté until they are well cooked. I fry the mushrooms on high stirring often to prevent burning for about 15 mins.
- Add the onions and garlic and stir often to prevent them from burning – about 5 mins. You can use the dry sherry at this point to deglaze the pan if you choose to use it. Cook until the alcohol is burned off – about 5 mins. Add the carrots, peas and corn and cook for about 10 mins to soften that carrots.
- Add the flour and cook for a couple of mins. Then reduce the heat to about medium and add the beef broth. You can let the gravy simmer until the meatballs are ready.
- Once the meatballs are done cooking let them drain on some paper towels. You can serve these on noodles, mashed potatoes covered in the gravy and vegetables. You can let people pick them out of a crockpot too with toothpicks – if you would like to do this just place the meatballs in the crockpot and cover with the gravy.
Add all of your ingredients to your bowl and mix together until well combined. I do this by hand to make sure I have everything well incorporated and really it’s just a lot quicker and a lot more fun to get your hands dirty. I always use a larger bowl for this part – it seems to be easier than struggling with a smaller bowl and making a mess. I try to break up the eggs and mix the breadcrumbs over the meat before really digging and mixing the ingredients together. This way you don’t get clumps of breadcrumbs in the meat mixture. If that happens, keep working the breadcrumbs into the meat to evenly distribute the ingredients.
This recipe calls for a little more meat than my regular meatballs recipes. I did this because of the size of the mashed potato pucks I made. These meatballs came out a little bigger than my normal meatballs and I wanted to make a good amount to share with others.
I have fallen in love with stuffing meatballs – especially with ingredients that are unexpected. The coolest thing I’ve been doing lately is freezing things to stuff meatballs with. I think it’s so much fun and a weird creative outlet for me. I really enjoy taking traditional dinners and turning them into meatballs – you get the entire meal in one meaty bite.
That’ where freezing ingredients to stuff a meatball with comes into play. It’s an easy way to get the whole dinner or classic meal into one bite sized ball. This does take some planning since generally the items that I freeze to stuff meatballs with take time to actually freeze and set up. I remember playing around one day with a couple of different meatball ideas and waiting for the trays of mashed potatoes or some cheese mixture to freeze. It seemed like it was taking forever! One perk of living in Minnesota and our winters that sometime to speed up the freezing process I just set things outside.
This is a pretty simple recipe once you have your ingredients ready. The most time consuming thing is getting the mashed potatoes cooked and frozen. You can always use store bought mashed potatoes to speed this up or you can even use the box mashed potatoes and freeze them. It’s totally up to you on how much time you have to put into this recipe or if you have a favorite store bought brand that is your go to.
I use little silicon half circle molds for the items I freeze. There are two sizes that I prefer to use for most of my recipes. The size and shape of the trays that I use make wrapping the meat mixture around the frozen item easier to work with. The half circle shape really works well with the round meatball.
The gravy recipe for this particular dish is a pretty easy and quick gravy to throw together. I am a huge fan of making sauces and I also love making gravies so these are things that we have on our dinner table often. I generally make big batches of beef broth on Sunday’s. It’s something that is so simple if you have the time to let it simmer on the stove all day. You can also throw the ingredients into a crockpot if you need to run errands or have family obligations you need to get to. The flavor of a homemade beef broth is second to none. I usually have a bunch made over a weekend and then freeze it or can it. That way on a busy weeknight you can just thaw some out or open a jar and you have the best beef broth imaginable for your meal.
One of the tricks that I use to help make the gravy nice and smooth and to help avoid lumps is that I add the flour to the sautéed vegetables. This coats the vegetables with the flour and helps cook the raw flour taste out as well. It evenly distributes the flour over the veggies too and prevents lumps of flour from ruining the texture of the gravy.
These meatballs are a great version of a classic comfort food. It’s a wonderful thing to make on a snowy weekend or if you have some of the ingredients prepped, it makes an awesome weeknight meal that everyone around the table will enjoy on a cold night. It’s also a great way to sneak in some veggies for those pickier eaters.
You can serve these meatballs over mashed potatoes for even more homey goodness or they can be served over egg noodles or even spaghetti. If you want to take these meatballs to a potluck to share with other you can gently add them to a crockpot and cover them with the gravy and let them simmer on warm until you are ready to serve them. I love meatballs because they are such an easy thing to throw together and are also great for sharing.
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Stuffed Meatballs
I love stuffing meatballs – and once you start browsing the site you’ll see that I’m pretty creative with what I can come up with to stuff my balls with – and every recipe is delicious.
