Comfort Food Express

After reading my first blog my husband has reclaimed How Merlot Can You Go? with a fervor only possible of a marine officer tasked with an official order. In the meantime I plan to continue sharing some delicious recipes and potential flops with interspersed anecdotes.
On a day when you're intent to make the students complete their peppered moth labs and geologic time lines and they're intent to eat the paper dots, play sword fights with the rulers and make falic symbols out of your tap dispenser you need comfort food. Obviously my timing for this warm and fuzzy feeling-inducing food was off. This day from hell was, of course, the last day before Thanksgiving break and my refrigerator consisted solely of produce and products dedicated to the most important meal of the year. The possibility of Mexican floated through my head and thoughts of heart-burn ensued. I stared at the contents of my fridge and decided to reinvent some of these ingredients for a new dish. My first notion was to use the Johnsonville sausage as a base for some spaghetti sauce but that just wasn't going to cut it. After some poking and prodding deep into the scary depths of the pantry and cabinets I came up with a delicious option for meatballs. If these circular nodes of glory don't qualify me for goddess status they still won't leave me empty handed with at least the beginning stages of cardiovascular disease - maybe both?

Sausage & Italian Parsley Meatballs
1 package Johnsonville Sweet Italian Sausage
1/2 cup fresh Italian parsley, rough chopped
1/4 cup Italian bread crumbs
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/8-1/4 cup Parmesan cheese, shredded
2 tblsps Worcester sauce
2 tblsps garlic olive oil, divided
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Combine all ingredients and 1 tblsp of the olive oil in a large mixing bowl. Mixture should be moist but shapeable. If mixture is too dry add more olive oil. If mixture is too wet add more bread crumbs until desired consistency is reached.
3. Roll 1 tblsp of mixture between palms until a round ball is formed. Continue until all mixture is used.
4. Brown meatballs in reserved tblsp of olive oil on all sides over medium high heat, approximately 1 minute per side.
5. Bake meatballs for 15-20 minutes more or until no pink remains in the center.

Serves 4.