Jan's Meatballs

Covered dish, potluck, carry-in, pot-blessing.... There are so many words for one really cool thing we do at our churches:

We eat together!

There's nothing like it. Eating, talking, playing with each other's babies, watching the young people hang out while you wonder if romance is blooming...

...and all with that delectable fragrance of mingled delicious aromas of everyone's favorite recipes.

In all of our moving around the Midwest, we've tasted quite a few varieties of lasgnas, chicken casseroles, green bean casseroles, baked ham, sweet potato casseroles - not to mention the thousand different recipes for cheese grits!

But the one recipe I've been coming back to again and again (because I can throw it together in about five minutes on Sunday morning and let it cook in the crock pot at church) is this meatball dish.

And it's super handy, because you can either use convenient cans and frozen meatballs, or you can make it all from scratch.

Jan's Meatballs

Ingredients:

approximately 60 Meatballs

2 cans Cream of Mushroom soup

1/4 cup Sour Cream

2 Tablespoons Caraway seeds

The meatballs can be the frozen kind from Walmart (or any other grocery store).

Just make sure you buy the regular, not the Italian.

Or you can make your own using the recipe I shared last month: Tortellini Soup with Meatballs. You'll have to double the recipe to get about sixty meatballs. Be sure to cook them well before adding them to this recipe.

The Cream of Mushroom soup can be from the familiar cans, or you can use the recipe from last week's blog: Homemade Cream of Mushroom Soup. 

Can you make homemade sour cream? Sure you can! Pour 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream into a cup and add about 1 teaspoon lemon juice. Stir, and then let it sit at room temperature for about 5 minutes (the longer you wait, the thicker it will get).

I can't help you with the Caraway Seeds. I buy mine from the spice section at the grocery store. ☺

Instructions:

Combine the soup, sour cream and caraway seeds in a very large bowl. Add the meatballs (frozen or not), and stir until all the meatballs are covered in the sauce.

Pour the mixture into a crock pot and cook on low for about 3 hours. 

That's it!

While you're making your meatballs, let's talk about spring. ☺

This is what spring looks like in the Black Hills. My dear husband and I went on a research trip to Deadwood, and came home through Spearfish Canyon on Saturday afternoon - absolutely beautiful weather! It was around 70° at home, but up here in the canyon it was a balmy 58°.

You can read about this scenic byway here: Spearfish Canyon

Yes, that white stuff is snow. There was about a foot of snow on the sides of the canyon, and several feet in the bottom.

But with views like this, who's going to be complaining about a little snow?

Spring flowers will get here in June! Meanwhile, we're expecting a winter storm over the next few days. We normally get our heaviest snowfalls in March and April.

April 22, 2013

So. Make me jealous. How is spring coming along in your neck of the woods?

PS - I can't forget a throwback picture! Yesterday was Thatcher and Jeter's birthdays!!!! So we get a gratuitous puppy picture today, and maybe we can get Ruthy to share one of Jeter on Thursday ☺

There's my guy! He's four weeks old in this picture.