If you would have told me a year ago that I would now be cooking and eating meatballs, I may have thought you were crazy. But, here we are and that is exactly what I am doing. I have been buying local ground pork almost weekly and these meatballs are one of my favorite creations using it. They are a combination of ground pork, onions, apples, toasted walnuts, dried thyme, nutmeg, salt, pepper and eggs. That’s it.
So, they’re definitely different than a traditional meatball. There are no breadcrumbs in these. I did a bit of research and found several recipes that didn’t use breadcrumbs successfully, so I decided to leave them out. Out of everything in these meatballs, not one ingredient or flavor stands out in particular to me – it all just sort of comes together very well. They taste like warming fall nourishment. As far as how to serve them, we have done them several different ways – with spaghetti squash and a healthy serving of pecorino Romano cheese, with a lemon tahini sauce and plain with a side of roasted cauliflower. When I was testing these, there were so many days when I packed a few of these meatballs with a bunch of roasted veggies for my lunch – no sauce, no cheese and they were just amazing. Flavor-wise, I don’t know how they would be with a red sauce, but I think that they would taste amazing with a garlicky alfredo-ish sauce. That’ll be next on my list.
One other note on this recipe – I only tested this with ground pork, so I’m not sure how these would be with another type of ground meat. I do feel like the pork lends itself very well with the other flavors going on in this recipe.
Enjoy this fall nourishment!
Pork Meatballs with Apples, Onions + Toasted Walnuts
Ingredients
- 1 cup walnuts,
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 1 onion
- 2 small apples
- 4 garlic cloves, minced
- 2 pounds ground pork
- 2 eggs
- 2 teaspoons salt
- 2 teaspoons thyme
- 2 teaspoons nutmeg
- 1 teaspoon black pepper
- Juice from one lemon
Instructions
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Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper.
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Roughly chop onion and apple. Heat 2 tablespoons butter in a pan over medium high heat and add onion, apple and minced garlic. Cook until slightly softened and slightly caramelized.
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Remove onion, apple and garlic mixture to a bowl and let cool slightly.
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Add walnuts to the pan, and cook over medium high heat until toasted. Remove from pan and place walnuts in a food processor. Process until crumb like in texture. Remove and set aside.
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Add onion, apple and garlic mixture to the food processor and process until slightly pureed, but with chunks remaining.
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In a large bowl, mix together ground pork, eggs, salt, thyme, nutmeg, black pepper, lemon juice, walnuts and onion, apple and garlic mixture. Mix until well combined.
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Form meatballs and place on prepared baking sheet. Bake for 15 minutes at 400 degrees, or until internal temperature is almost at 160 degrees. Broil for 5 minutes to brown the top of the meatballs and to finish cooking.