One of my missions for this month is to try and use up some of the food in the freezer as my lack of meal planning recently has meant that a lot of the bargains I’ve been buying with good intentions from the reduced section in the supermarket have been going straight in the freezer and simply staying there. This means I have a freezer full of food and not much room left for any more bargains!I spotted a couple of packets of sausages in there along with a big batch of my homemade tomato sauce so I thought I’d have a go at making meatball marinara for tea yesterday afternoon. I’m not usually a meatball fan but this was absolutely delicious with spaghetti for tea and apparently even tastier when Mr Frugal had the leftovers later on in a baguette with some cheese.
I made sausages into meatballs for our meatball marinara today but you could easily just make your own with some mince or even buy them ready made from the shop (shock horror) which isn’t my preferred option personally but after the Summer I’ve had, I understand more than anyone how important the odd shortcut in the kitchen can be if you’re pushed for time or energy. You could even use a jar of sauce for this if you want to make it even easier but don’t tell anyone I told you that you could use ready made meatballs AND sauce!
How to make quick and easy marvellous slow cooker meatball marinara
1 portion of homemade tomato sauce
2 packs of 8 sausages (we used pork sausages)
If you’re using frozen ingredients like I was then you need to defrost them in the fridge overnight.
- Using a sharp knife, slit the sausages open one by one and remove the meat from the skins.
- With floured hands, squidge the sausage meat into round shapes and set to one side, I found that each sausage made 3 meatballs. I read before I made mine that some sausages might need some breadcrumbs adding so they hold their shape better but I didn’t bother as my little balls felt quite firm. 😉
- Add the homemade tomato sauce to the slow cooker and gently stir in the meatballs.
- Cook on low for 6(ish) hours.
- I found that I had to just use a big spoon to spoon off a little bit of grease from the top of the marinara half way through cooking and again at the end. I’m guessing that this is because I didn’t brown the sausage meatballs first but it only took a minute each time so I’d still do it this way again in future.
- Serve with spaghetti or in a baguette with a little melted cheese.
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