Crock pot Turkey Meatballs

I feel like people don’t use recipes for meatballs. Whenever I would ask people for their meatball recipe they would be like, “Oh it’s so simple! You just crack an egg into your chopped meat, add some breadcrumbs, make ballies and place them in a pot of boiling marinara sauce.” Regardless of the easy peasy recipes- that don’t actually require a recipe-my meatballs always failed.

Anyways, as a stay-home mom, I am always desperate for a new recipe to add to our weekly dinner menus. I came across a “sweet and sour meatball” recipe in the BY cookbook and decided to give it a spin. (FYI- Besides for family recipes and the Chabad cookbook/pamphlet, the BY cookbook is the only cookbook that I took to Israel with me!) I don’t know what possessed me, but I decided to make it in our crockpot. There is so much hype about crockpot dinners that I wanted to get in on the act! Plus, I hated the idea of having a pot on the stove for 2 hours straight and needing to constantly check and stir. I gave it a try and it worked great, thank Gd. Eventually, I realized that chopped turkey is literally half the price of chopped meat, so I substituted the chopped meat for chopped turkey. I still call them turkey meatballs even though there is no meat.

We LOVE this recipe. It’s super delicious! I make the recipe in the morning, throw it all in the crockpot, and then I just go about my day! Come 4:00 when I serve my children dinner, I have a warm pot of meatballs waiting to be served. Mommy dinner mission accomplished!

Hope this recipe works for you as well as it does for us!

Crockpot turkey meat balls

Preparation time: 10 minutes

Cook time: a minimum of 5 hours in crockpot

Yields: 8-10 servings

Ingredients:

Meatballs:

2 pounds chopped meat or chopped turkey or a pound of each

½ cup bread crumbs

2 large eggs

3 tablespoons ketchup

½ teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon onion powder

1 teaspoon garlic

Salt

Pepper

½ an onion diced

Sweet and Sour Sauce:

1 (16 ounce) can tomato sauce

1 cup water

¾ cup sugar

¼ cup brown sugar

¼ cup lemon juice

¼ cup ketchup                                                  

Other half of an onion diced

Instructions:

1.       Mix all your meatball ingredients together (I use my hands).

2.       Mix all your sauce ingredients together in your crockpot. I use crockpot bags and they are a LIFESAVER! You should use them too! They’ll cut your cleaning time in half.

3.       Once the sauce is ready, turn your crockpot on high and start rolling out the meatballs and dropping them in the crockpot. There will be a number of meatballs that won’t be able to be submerged in the sauce. I like to stir the meatballs half-way through or ¾ of the way through cooking time, to rotate the meatballs under the sauce.

4.      I cook the meatballs for generally 4.5-6 hours on high. I put them up around 10AM and I serve them to the kids around 4PM. Then I put the lid back on serve them again later to my husband. You may need to experiment to see what works best for your crockpot.

5.       Serve over spaghetti and enjoy!