Paleo Meatballs and Holy Hell I ran 5 Miles!

Lets begin with the fact that I ran 5 miles yesterday. Not gonna lie, I feel pretty bad ass. I’ve got 6.9 miles to run on Sunday so at least I know I can run the majority of it.  On Sunday a couple of my friends are running in the Surfers Path Marathon & Capitola Half Marathon. My trainer is running the half marathon, and I’m running in the relay half marathon with one of my friends (hence the 6.9 miles). I’m pretty excited about it actually. I go through phases of loving long distance running (5 miles is a long distance for me lol) and loving HIIT type running. Right now I’m loving both, so yay for that. Friday’s plan is to try to run 5-6 miles on a path near my house. I really should have done this last week, but I didn’t really stick to any sort of training schedule.

Ok, onto the meatballs. Since starting my paleo journey I’ve tried to keep my meals simple and paleo, really only cooking from It Starts with Food or Well Fed. This past weekend my family, Steven, and I went to our favorite Italian restaurant for a family dinner and I realized how much I missed cooking my favorite italian foods. So Monday night I proclaimed to Steven “I’m making meatballs this week. And Sauce. We’re Italian. This needs to happen”. Pretty much word for word. His response? “Can I have pasta?” Of course love.

In creating these meatballs I had to think about how I’ve made them normally. Where do I substitute ingredients to make them truly paleo? How do I keep the flavor there? It was actually much easier than I thought. I present to you Paleo Meatballs:

Paleo Meatballs (Makes 18 “chuck-it” ball size meatballs)  <<— if you have a dog that likes to play fetch, you know what a chuckit is

1 pack organic ground beef (Costco baby)

1 pack organic ground turkey (not costco!)

2 eggs

1 cup grated white onion (I used my food processor)

4 garlic cloves, chopped

1/2 cup fresh chopped italian parsley

1 cup almond flour

Salt

Pepper

Dried Basil, oregano, thyme, rosemary, fennel.

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400*

Put the meat in a large bowl and season with salt and pepper (about 1 tbsp salt, 1 tsp pepper). Then add your grated onion, garlic, eggs and parsley. Mix slightly to start distributing the ingredients. Next, pour the almond flour in a small bowl and add your dried herbs. (I added what looked good). About a tablespoon (each) of dried basil and oregano. 3/4 teaspoon of thyme and rosemary, and about a teaspoon of fennel.)  Mix this around and add to your meat . Combine everything with your hands, being careful not to mix too much (you don’t want to break down the meat too much, just incorporate the ingredients).

Take a large cookie sheet and line with foil. Spray with coconut oil. Form your meatballs and place about an inch apart on your cookie sheet. Mine were slightly smaller than baseballs. Cook for 20-25 minutes (depending on the size of your meatballs). Mine cooked for 25 minutes and were absolutely perfect.

I’m telling you. These meatballs came out better than I had expected. Steven loved them, I gloated for a good hour. It was great. I served these with my standard marinara sauce (also paleo) and it was a perfect meal. I’ll post the marinara sauce recipe later!