Interconnecting Meals: Meatball Soup To Garlic And Meatball Pizza With White Sauce

During our cooking adventures over the last eight years of marriage, Megan and I have discovered that shopping on a limited budget doesn't mean having to rely on microwave dinners and pre-packaged meals.

In fact, the opposite is frequently true: if you keep your eyes on sales, shop smart, and come up with a weekly meal plan, buying fresh ingredients for fantastic dinners can be significantly less expensive than relying on fast, frozen, or canned food.

We've been coming up with interesting ways to interconnect dinners while putting together our weekly meal plan for years now (like black bean burritos to black bean burgers or the epic habenero mac and cheese) and our latest way to interconnect the dishes throughout a week involved both kale and homemade meatballs.

First we used kale in the bacon and caramelized onion pasta dish made earlier in the week, which will also be included here in a soup. The soup meanwhile uses meatballs that will be frozen and stretched into two meals for a Friday night pizza.

For kale and meatball soup, you'll need:

•    1 pound ground pork (or more if you are feeding a larger number of people)
•    2 strips bacon, diced
•    4 tbsp minced garlic (2 for the meatballs, 2 for the soup)
•    3 tbsp Parmesan cheese
•    1 tbsp breadcrumbs
•    1 egg
•    Seasonings – parsley, salt, and pepper
•    1 bunch fresh kale
•    ¼ - ½ tsp crushed red pepper
•    2 ½ cups chicken stock (homemade preferred, if you go with store bought, we recommend Knorr’s Homestyle)
•    1 can cannellini beans
•    1 tsp. olive oil

We'll be making these meatballs a bit different than our usual giant cheese-stuffed meatballs for pasta (for a look at how those come together, head over here). To put these together, mix the ground pork with the diced bacon, half the garlic, the Parmesan cheese, breadcrumbs, and egg.

After mixing thoroughly, form them into small sized meatballs (smaller than for pasta). Reserve half of them to put in the freezer.

Next we're going to start the soup by cooking the oil and garlic for a few minutes and then adding in the stock, seasonings, kale, and cannellini beans.

You could cook the meatballs separately on the skillet or in the stove and then toss them in at the last second, but to save on dishes and use less oil we're going to let them boil in the soup - about 25 - 30 minutes should do it, resulting in a cooked-through meatball with a great taste and texture.

Here's our delicious soup that has both loads of flavor and the health benefits of kale and beans.

For the second meal making use of the rest of the meatballs, we're going non-traditional and putting them on a pizza! We thought about what sort of sauces we normally like and how we'd usually have meatballs with pasta, so we decided to go with a white Alfredo style sauce instead of a tomato-based one. For this pizza, you'll need:

•    Pizza crust
•    ½ pound frozen pork meatballs
•    ½ cup heavy whipping cream
•    ¼ cup Parmesan
•    2 fresh garlic cloves, sliced
•    Button mushrooms, sliced
•    Shredded mozzarella and monterrey jack

We do our own homemade crusts, which we won't go over yet again how to make here. If you haven't done homemade crust before, definitely give it a shot! Hit up a site like Allrecipes and try a few until you get the one that offers your preferred level of crispiness (or doughiness!) and the thickness you like.

The other half of our meatballs were frozen and are now coming out of the freezer. Don't thaw them ahead of time, as they cook just fine from frozen directly on the pizza.

For the sauce, heat together the butter, heavy whipping cream, and a little Parmesan on the stove top.

We're also going to do something that not nearly enough pizza places have figured out is amazingly flavorful - sliced fresh garlic!

...but wait, what's that in the background?

Is that a MOUNTAIN OF CHEESE?

Why yes, yes it is. A mountain of mozzarella and monterrey jack to be specific.

Pour the sauce onto the crust...

...and use the back of a spoon to spread it evenly across.

Arrange your cheese and toppings however you'd like! We decided to also add on sliced mushrooms for extra flavor and heartiness.

Pop it in the oven for about 20 minutes, and you've got something far better than what any delivery place would bring you.

This is one of the reason why making the meatballs smaller is important, so they don't take up too much pizza real estate and make it harder to pick up and eat. If you went too large by accident, simply cut them in half before placing them on the pizza.

Novel Noodles: Kale and Caramelized Onion Pasta

If you've been following Six-Seven-Eight for any length of time, you've probably realized we love creamy Alfredo style pastas (in fact it's one of the reasons we're married today!).

While those are great every now and again, sometimes you need to shake things up and try a less fattening option or just simply one with different types of flavors. That's were today's look at novel noodles comes in - we're going to make a pasta that mimics the cream style, but which doesn't actually use heavy cream or butter.

For Kale and Caramelized Onion Pasta, you'll need:

•    Your preferred pasta – we used ziti, but penne or bowties would be great as well
•    1 bunch fresh kale
•    1 – 2 white or yellow onions
•    1 tbsp. minced garlic
•    ¼ - ½ cup Parmesan
•    5 strips bacon
•    3 Tbsp. half and half

Here's the one concession to the less-healthy side of cooking in the recipe: bacon! By using bacon you both get a fun crunchy element, but you can also use the bacon grease to cook the onions, so there's no need to add extra butter or oil.

After the bacon is crispy, we're going to set it aside and break it into small pieces to add back into the pasta later.

With the pan still hot and filled with bacon grease, throw in the minced garlic and sliced onion rings and let them caramelize for about 20 minutes. If you wanted to go an even healthier route, you could buy pre-packaged bacon bits and simply cook the onions in a few teaspoons of olive oil. While the onions are caramelizing, start cooking your preferred pasta in a separate pot of water.

Next we're going to roughly chop the kale. This is a vegetable we hadn't used much until a few years ago when we discovered the glory of putting kale in soup. Now we try to add it to recipes whenever possible!

Throw the chopped kale in with the onions and let the greens start to cook through.

Now toss your cooked pasta into the pan with the kale and bacon, but don't drain all the water - reserve about 1/4 - 1/2 cup. Sprinkle your Parmesan cheese into the pasta and start stirring.

Slowly add in the reserved water while stirring until the cheese melts in and the pasta is at the level of moisture you want. If it's not quite creamy enough for you, add in a few tablespoons of half and half, as this will give you the same texture and a similar flavor without actually going all the way to heavy cream. Throw in the bacon bits and you're almost done!

Plate up and grind some fresh pepper on top for a satisfying meal that taste's more decadent than it really is, while offering up the health benefits of kale!

Culinary World Tour: Spain (Grilled Paella)

In an effort to experience the flavors and cooking styles that ever corner of the Earth has to offer, we've embarked on the "Culinary World Tour," which lets us taste the cuisine of every nation all from the comfort of our own home. If you missed the previous entries in our world tour, check them out using these links:

England: Yorkshire Pudding
Ireland: Shepherd's Pie
Iceland: Lamb Pie With Rye Crust
Greenland: Suaasat
Canada: Poutine
Mexico: Posole

Now the world tour has hit Spain, which has an incredibly versatile range of traditional dishes for us to choose from. Eventually we settled on paella: a classic Spanish rice dish, but we're putting a little twist on it by heading outside and cooking it on the grill!

To make this paella, you'll need:

•    2 cups chicken stock
•    5 – 6 on the vine tomatoes
•    1 - 2 big heaping handfuls of fresh green beans
•    2 bell peppers of your preferred variety – red and green work great
•    1 ½ cups uncooked parboiled rice
•    5 chicken drumsticks
•    2 tbsp. minced garlic
•    2 tbsp. olive oil
•    Seasonings – saffron threads, rosemary, paprika, sea salt, pepper

This is both an indoor and outdoor meal, with preparation taking place both on the counter and stovetop and outside on the grill. To get started, mix together a few teaspoons of rosemary and about 15 or so threads of saffron (both of these will add an amazing aromatic component when cooking out on the grill later) with a few pinches of salt, pepper, and paprika.

Pour the seasoning mixture into the rice and mix together with a spoon, then transfer it all to a container to take outside (we used plastic tupperware containers with the lids on for easy transporting).

Paella is a very versatile dish, as there are many different meat and vegetable combinations out there. One of the most common protein combos used in paella is shrimp and sausage. If you wanted a really authentically rustic Valencian flavor, you could even go all out and use snails and rabbit!

We decided to go a more simple route for our first attempt at paella, using chicken drumsticks. Here I've seasoned them lightly with salt and rosemary.

One interesting aspect of paella that got us outside our comfort zone was how it typically uses grated tomatoes. We'd never even considered grating tomatoes before - always instead going the traditional route of slicing, dicing, etc. To grate tomatoes, first cut them in half to expose the insides.

Next you'll want to scoop out as much of the seeds as possible so you're just left with the tomato flesh.

Press the flesh side of the tomato against the grater (the skin side should be facing away from the grater) and go to town like you would with a block of cheese.

Keep grating until all the flesh is inside the grater and you're left with just the skin.

Now you can just simply discard the leftover skin, since it won't be used in the dish. With no skin and no seeds you've removed all the components of a tomato that can give a bitter flavor when cooking for extended lengths of time.

Here's the grated flesh of 6 on-the-vine tomatoes in a tupperware container ready to go. Next, chop up the bell peppers and snap the ends of the green beans and take everything but the stock outside (that needs to cook inside, which we'll explain in a bit).

For more of a rustic feel, we used wood instead of standard charcoal, which has a more potent scent and will impart a better smoke flavor. Here we've got the drumsticks cooking over a roaring fire on an oven safe pan.

After the skin starts to get crispy on all sides, spoon in the olive oil, garlic, chopped bell peppers, and green beans.

Give the vegetables a few minutes to soften and infuse with garlic flavor, then add in the grated tomatoes.

Next we're going to throw in the uncooked, seasoned rice. Remember that stock we mentioned earlier? We've had it cooking on the stovetop inside the whole time so it would be boiling.

Because the rice won't cook as long as if you were say cooking on the stovetop or in a rice cooker, we need the stock to be immediately boiling hot to ensure the rice cooks through.

Here we're pouring the hot stock into the pan on the grill. Of course we recommend using homemade stock, but store-bought works as well.

Now close the grill lid and let the rice cook while soaking up the stock for 20 - 25 minutes. The rice should be firm but not hard.

Using some oven mitts and careful maneuvering, we bring the whole pan inside once the rice has finished cooking.

And here's our finished product: an amazingly flavorful drumstick on a bed of rice and vegetables!

Let's dig in!

This was of course just one of many wonderful dishes from Spain, and we're looking forward to trying more in the future.

This one was an astounding success that is really the whole package: hearty, delicious, and with an aroma to die for. Adding in the outdoor grilling element just made it more fun and great way to spend an afternoon with friends and family.

Stay tuned, as the culinary world tour will continue on throughout Europe soon!