A Girl's Gotta Eat!

So, we were lounging about yesterday morning, thrilled at having no plans for the entire weekend (a rare occurrence indeed). We were enjoying some (deer) steak and eggs for breakfast and watching The Pioneer Women on the Food Network channel. We like Ree a lot. They seem to have a really cool family, and her recipes sound delicious and totally make-able. Anyway, while we were eating breakfast yesterday, Ree was making Rigatoni and Meatballs. The meatballs looked amazing, and the more we watched, the more we thought we needed meatballs for dinner last night. I've made meatballs plenty of times, but have always used either my mom's recipe or no recipe at all. We decided we needed Ree's meatballs. And so, as we ventured out in the rain and drizzle for a few Christmas things, we stopped by Kroger for meatballs fixin's. And nothing against rigatoni, but decided we really wanted spaghetti with our meatballs. Three things we did differently: We used 3/4 cup breadcrumbs...

I meant to post this one two weeks ago, so I'll keep it short. Mike had drill, and he had been hungry for "regular spaghetti." I decided to take it up a notch and create homemade marinara and meatballs. I wanted a recipe for marinara that was reliable, but easy. We have a cookbook from Mario Batali that came in handy. The following recipe was super-easy and super-tasty. I don't know that we'll buy marinara again. I'm not a fan of big tomato chunks, so I used my immersion blender to smooth out the chunky bits. It's really up to your personal taste, though. I doubled the recipe, mostly due to the fact that I love really saucy pasta. It was fantastic having leftovers. The sauce especially turned out extremely scrumptious, and the original recipe specifies that you can freeze the sauce for up to 6 months. We didn't have any to freeze after a week, but it's duly noted. :) I didn't use a recipe for the meatballs, but I used 1 pound of lean ground...