Melt In Your Mouth Meatballs

I am a HUGE fan of Recipezaar. I stumbled upon in about one month ago when I was searching for a dessert using blackberries. I love the how user-friendly the website is. It is lightning fast to look up recipes. My daughter wanted to have buttered pasta for her birthday yesterday so Iwas looking for a sauce that I could cook in the crock pot. After all, I would be very happy with buttered pasta, but the men would not! Men have to have meat or they think they aren't have a real meal or something. Does this happen to all you other ladies out there?

Anyway, I typed in meatballs and searched by ratings. Kittencal's Famous Italian Melt-In-Your-Mouth Meatballs popped up on the screen. It was rated 5 star recipe by 472 people so how could I go wrong? I had to double the recipe so I decided to go with 2 pounds of ground beef and 1 pound of mild italian sausage. I kept all the other measurements the same. I believe the recipe calls for you to cook the meatballs in the sauce, but also says that you can bake them for about 25 minutes. I decided to bake them. I have cooked meatballs in sauce before and had the sauce become a little greasy. I didn't want that to happen at the birthday party, so I baked them just in case. The outcome was so fabulous! I used 80/20 ground beef and there was no grease at all. The only thing on the baking sheet was a little bit of melted parmesan. These meatballs were so super tasty and delicous when they first came out of the oven. They were almost better without any sauce on them at all. My husband was standing over the oven trying to steal all the meatballs. He kept saying "Are you sure you need all those for the party tomorrow."

I refrigerated them overnight and added them to the sauce the next morning and cooked them in the sauce in the crockpot until they were heated through. They were a big hit at the party yesterday. These meatballs were very flavorful. You can taste the garlic, parsley, oregano, and parmesan cheese. There is nothing bland about them at all. And, every single meatball held its shape. They were baked, regfrigerated, dumped in the crockpot, and stirred and stirred and poked by several people. There were no little broken up pieces at all. I was super impressed with this meatball recipe and will be trying it again. I'm especially thinking about turning this recipe into a meatloaf. We love meatloaf at our house. It's one of our favorites!!