Pesto Meatballs

It's been awhile since I've done a post about food. I did a lot of cooking today so I thought it would be a good day for one of these types of posts. I had to prepare a salad to take to Easter dinner tomorrow. I made one called wonton salad, a recipe I got from a lady who was a student in a summer class I took a few years ago. It has only 4 ingredients: lettuce of your choice, chicken, red pepper, and crunched up baked wonton wrappers. The dressing is sweet and sour with sesame seeds in it. It's really a yummy salad and I am excited to eat it tomorrow as it has been awhile since I've had it. I didn't take any pictures of the salad.....maybe tomorrow.

I knew that I also wanted to make a new recipe I saw recently in a magazine. This one called for all ingredients which I had on hand except roasted red peppers and ricotta cheese. I checked online and found that I could substitute cottage cheese, cream cheese, or even sour cream for the ricotta. I had all 3 of those on hand so that was no big deal. I also had a jar of pimentoas on hand which would have worked in place of the red peppers. But.....I also had 2 red peppers in the fridge (because the salad above calls for 1-2 red peppers). I knew that I could try to make my own roasted red peppers with one of these, which is exactly what I did!

I went online and looked up how to roast a red pepper. I had read this in the past but never tried it so I forgot how to do it. They gave 3 options: on the grill (I wasn't planning to be outside in our awful rainy weather today), on a gas stove (which I don't have), or in the oven using the broiler. This was my method of choice. I basically had to keep an eye on the peppers and turn them every few minutes. When the skin turned black, I then pulled them out and put them in a bowl with an airtight lid for awhile to let the steam do its work. About 30 minutes later, I pulled that black skin off and then diced them. Voila! Roasted red peppers! How exciting! They tasted really good too!

Please excuse the crappy quality of the picture here. At this point, I didn't know I was going to blog about this and I took this picture with my phone simply to send to my foodie friend Katie! I knew she would be excited for me!


I've never made meatballs before! I know that sounds crazy but it's true. The thing that attracted me to these particular meatballs is that they are called "Pesto Meatballs." I love pesto!


Last summer, I had a basil plant on my front steps in a pot and it grew like crazy! I couldn't use all of the basil it was producing so every so often, I would pick a bunch of the leaves and make my own pesto. I froze it in an ice cube tray and now I have 2 bags of pesto cubes in my freezer (well, I only probably have 1 bag left by now). So when the recipe called for "prepared pesto," I have that on hand! Yay!


Look at all the yummy goodness that you can actually see in these meatballs.....the green specs are the pesto (basil), you can see onions, and of course my roasted red pepper!