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.