Slow cooker meatballs

I recently wrote about my slow cooker and the Margaret Fulton crock pot cookbook. Yesterday I cooked the mushroom meatballs from her crock pot recipe book and despite my trepidation they turned out quite well. I wasn’t sure about the canned mushrooms as they looked very unappetising.

You can see in the photo that I’ve got my red kidney beans soaking so that I can make a bean mix that I use for nachos and/or tacos. Soaking half a kilo of red kidney beans will eventually give me enough bean mix for four-five lots of nachos for the two of us. Now that I have the slow cooker I cook the bean mix in it because it nearly always used to burn when I did it on the stove top but I don’t have that problem with the slow cooker. See why I love it?

Here’s Margaret Fulton’s mushroom meatballs recipe (with my adjustments in brackets):

Ingredients

• 500g (1lb) lean minced beef
• 250g (8oz) minced pork and veal (I used sausage mince)
• 1 egg
• 3 tablespoons chopped parsley (I used parsley and oregano as my parsley’s mostly gone to seed)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1.5 cups fresh breadcrumbs
• (I added one small chopped onion to meatball mix)

Gravy

• 240g (8oz) can muchrooms in butter sauce (I think I’d prefer to make my own next time)
• 1 cup stock
• 1/3 cup flour
• 1/4 cup dry sherry (I should get some cooking sherry but I read you can also use a bit of vanilla essence which is what I did. It smelt awful at first but worked out okay)
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1 cup sour cream

Method

Combine all ingredients for gravy except sour cream in crock pot; stir thoroughly.

Mix all ingredients for meat balls. Shape into walnut size and brown in frypan. Add meat balls to gravy mixture in crock pot, cover and cook on Low setting for 6 to 8 hours, or High 2 to 4 hours.

Fifteen minutes before serving, stir in sour cream, reheat on High. Serve with noodles or boiled rice. We also ate with some steamed broccoli as it doesn’t seem right to have a meal without vegetables.

Serves 6.

It turned out quite well and will do us for a couple of meals and I’ll put the rest into the freezer for another meal.