Mom's Applesauce Meatballs
"A childhood favorite, whenever Mom made these meatballs they'd disappear quickly off the dinner table!"
- Ready In:
- 1hr 15mins
- Ingredients:
- 13
- Serves:
-
4
ingredients
- 907.18 g ground beef
- 236.59 ml applesauce
- 236.59 ml soft breadcrumbs
- 2 eggs
- salt
- pepper
- flour
- 29.58 ml vegetable oil
-
Vegetables - this is important for the flavor and sauce
- 1 stalk celery, thinly sliced
- 1 green pepper, minced
- 1 carrot, thinely sliced
- 1 small onion, thinly sliced
- 473.18 ml tomato juice or 473.18 ml V8 vegetable juice
directions
- Mix beef, applesauce, and bread crumbs.
- Add eggs; season with salt and pepper.
- Shape into small balls, roll in flour and brown in hot oil.
- Place balls in a casserole dish.
- To drippings in pan add vegetables and tomato juice.
- Season with salt and pepper and bring to a boil, then pour over meat balls (this is an important step).
- Cover and bake in a moderate oven of 350 degrees for about an hour, until vegetables have broken down and have created a nice sauce.
- If desired, the gravy can be thickened with a little flour-water paste before serving.
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Reviews
-
This was so good. My whole family enjoyed it. I waited until after dinner to tell them it had applesauce in it. My kids looked at me kinda funny then! I even made sandwiches with the leftovers for my husband and me to take to work the next day. I'll definitely be making this recipe again! -
This sounded intriguing, so I just had to try it. And I'm glad I did I did make a couple of adjustments, though. I'm trying to eat lower fat and lower sodium foods, so I substituted ground turkey breast for the beef and used lower sodium tomato juice rather than V-8 juice and used olive oil rather than vegetable oil. BF wasn't too sure about this when he saw me put the applesauce in but, in the end, he gave it a high rating. It was good using the turkey, so I can imagine how good it would be using beef. The liquid cooked down quite a bit when I baked it. I'm not sure if the turkey absorbed some if it -- that's possible. We both felt it could have used more of the sauce, so next time I will make another batch of the sauce and just let it simmer on the stove so we can put more sauce over the meatballs. All in all, we really enjoyed this, and we'll definitely be making this one again -- and I'll be sure to try it with the beef, too! Thank you for sharing a recipe from your childhood!
Tweaks
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This sounded intriguing, so I just had to try it. And I'm glad I did I did make a couple of adjustments, though. I'm trying to eat lower fat and lower sodium foods, so I substituted ground turkey breast for the beef and used lower sodium tomato juice rather than V-8 juice and used olive oil rather than vegetable oil. BF wasn't too sure about this when he saw me put the applesauce in but, in the end, he gave it a high rating. It was good using the turkey, so I can imagine how good it would be using beef. The liquid cooked down quite a bit when I baked it. I'm not sure if the turkey absorbed some if it -- that's possible. We both felt it could have used more of the sauce, so next time I will make another batch of the sauce and just let it simmer on the stove so we can put more sauce over the meatballs. All in all, we really enjoyed this, and we'll definitely be making this one again -- and I'll be sure to try it with the beef, too! Thank you for sharing a recipe from your childhood!
RECIPE SUBMITTED BY
Julesong
Tukwila, 87
<p>It's simply this: I love to cook! :) <br /><br />I've been hanging out on the internet since the early days and have collected loads of recipes. I've tried to keep the best of them (and often the more unusual) and look forward to sharing them with you, here. <br /><br />I am proud to say that I have several family members who are also on RecipeZaar! <br /><br />My husband, here as <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/39857>Steingrim</a>, is an excellent cook. He rarely uses recipes, though, so often after he's made dinner I sit down at the computer and talk him through how he made the dishes so that I can get it down on paper. Some of these recipes are in his account, some of them in mine - he rarely uses his account, though, so we'll probably usually post them to mine in the future. <br /><br />My sister <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/65957>Cathy is here as cxstitcher</a> and <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/62727>my mom is Juliesmom</a> - say hi to them, eh? <br /><br />Our <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/379862>friend Darrell is here as Uncle Dobo</a>, too! I've been typing in his recipes for him and entering them on R'Zaar. We're hoping that his sisters will soon show up with their own accounts, as well. :) <br /><br />I collect cookbooks (to slow myself down I've limited myself to purchasing them at thrift stores, although I occasionally buy an especially good one at full price), and - yes, I admit it - I love FoodTV. My favorite chefs on the Food Network are Alton Brown, Rachel Ray, Mario Batali, and Giada De Laurentiis. I'm not fond over fakey, over-enthusiastic performance chefs... Emeril drives me up the wall. I appreciate honesty. Of non-celebrity chefs, I've gotta say that that the greatest influences on my cooking have been my mother, Julia Child, and my cooking instructor Chef Gabriel Claycamp at Seattle's Culinary Communion. <br /><br />In the last couple of years I've been typing up all the recipes my grandparents and my mother collected over the years, and am posting them here. Some of them are quite nostalgic and are higher in fat and processed ingredients than recipes I normally collect, but it's really neat to see the different kinds of foods they were interested in... to see them either typewritten oh-so-carefully by my grandfather, in my grandmother's spidery handwriting, or - in some cases - written by my mother years ago in fountain pen ink. It's like time travel. <br /><br />Cooking peeve: food/cooking snobbery. <br /><br />Regarding my black and white icon (which may or may not be the one I'm currently using): it the sea-dragon tattoo that is on the inside of my right ankle. It's also my personal logo.</p>
