A great, somewhat-complicated-but-totally-worth-it version of meatballs in tomato sauce
Mix ricotta, parsley, parmesan, bread crumbs, eggs, garlic and onion in a large bowl. Season with salt, pepper and crushed red pepper flakes if you like and let sit for 10 minutes or so (this will hydrate your bread crumbs, which will make the meatballs very tender).
Add beef and pork and and mix well. I find ground beef to be hard to mix. If you don’t buy the ground beef/pork mixture, I’d advise that you mix the beef and pork together in a separate bowl and then add that to the bread crumb mixture, as you’ll have an easier time of incorporating everything evenly. Some people say that the only way to mix something like this is with your hands, so you can do that if you want to. (I don’t.)
Once everything is well-mixed, roll one tiny sacrificial meatball. Heat a little olive oil in the pot you’re going to use to brown the meatballs, preferably a 12-inchnonstick skillet. Add the sacrificial meatball and cook until it’s well browned on all sides and is cooked through. Take it out of the pot and eat it. Alison says, “Does it taste amazing? Salty? Meaty? Tender and juicy without falling apart? Do you want it spicier? Go ahead and adjust seasoning as needed. (OccasionallyI’ll add more salt or decide this is when I want them spicy.)”
Roll the rest of the mixture into balls about 2-inches in diameter. You should get roughly 24 meatballs from this mixture.
Working in batches, brown the meatballs on all sides, about 3–4 minutes per batch, using perhaps one tablespoon of olive oil per batch and doing 2-3 batches. As noted above, your best bet here is a large nonstick skillet. They will not be cooked through, and that’s fine-- they will finish cooking in the sauce. As you finish each batch, remove the meatballs with tongs to a plate or bowl and use a heatproof spatula to scrape the oil/browned bits into the large pot (Dutch oven, stockpot, soup pot,whatever) that you plan to use for the sauce.
Add the onions to the large pot with the drippings from the meatballs and season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until they’re translucent and tender but not yet browned, 8–10 minutes. You may need a little more oil. Add garlic, anchovies if you’re using them and tomato paste and stir until the anchovies are melted and the tomato paste has begun to caramelize and turn a darker shade of red, 2–3 minutes.
Add the fresh tomatoes if using and season with salt and pepper. Cook until they’reburst and jammy, 5 minutes or so. Add the canned tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper.
Bring to a simmer and adjust for salt, knowing the sauce will reduce a bit and become abit saltier once you add the meatballs. Add your meatballs and all the juices that have collected at the bottom of the plate or bowl where they’ve been sitting.
Reduce the heat to low and simmer the meatballs in the sauce (uncovered) until the sauceis thickened and the meatballs are cooked through and perfectly tender, 30–40minutes.
Alison recommends that you use short, stubby pasta and not spaghetti, an idea I vehemently agree with. She says to cook it just short of al dente and then drain it and mix it with a little bit of the sauce so that it doesn’t stick together. I’d serve the pasta and meatballs/sauce separately so that people can adjust proportions to taste. (For my son, that’s about 3 pieces of pasta.) Let (or make) guests grate their ownParmesan over the top.
*Alison says that she’s also used cottage cheese, which worked perfectly “because cottage cheese is perfect!”—to which I say, yuk! Wouldn’t there be those little curdled bits all the way through? But use it if you want to, or if that’s all you have and you don’t want to run to the store. I’d mash it up a little bit with a fork, myself. And you'd need to have whole-milk cottage cheese and not that low-fat stuff, which is all they sell in my neck of the woods. So you're going to have to go to the store anyway. Sorry!
**Or you can make your own from that stale bread you frugally stashed in your freezer. Just don’t use those horrible “Italian bread crumbs” from the store that look like sand.
***I used a 50/50 blend of ground beef and pork that I happened to spot at the grocery store. It worked fine and was easy to incorporate since half of the job was already done. I couldn't be choosy about the type of beef, though. I'm going to try this recipe again using ground chuck with the pork bought separately, but this version came out very well.
Note: It's very little more work to make a double batch of the meatballs and freeze half. Spread out the uncooked meatballs on a baking sheet or other tray and freeze until solid, then put in a bag and use as desired--just like the Costco ones!
Also-you wouldn't have to make your own sauce, particularly if you're doing the leftover frozen ones and you didn't make a double batch of the sauce and freeze that. You could just fry the meatballs in the skillet as directed above and then heat them all together with as much jarred sauce as you like, probably just using that same pan if it's deep enough.