How Kids Can Make Fancy Asian Meatballs

I have no problems eating a bowl of white rice for dinner. Add some soy sauce, and I am good to go. However, my Mom thinks that adding some protein to that bowl is necessary to call it a meal. So I decided to see if I could find a recipe that might grab my attention and allow me to eat my bowl of rice, with a bit of meat to make everyone happy. I came across some options, but it took some experimenting to get my version of fancy Asian meatballs.

My Experimenting with Asian Meatballs

The first recipe that I found looked delicious, but it seemed a bit harder because you had to make your own meatballs instead of using pre-made, frozen ones. Since we did not have any of those handy, this worked out better for me. However, it did call for ground pork, and we only had frozen ground beef in our freezer. I decided it was worth a try anyway. It didn’t seem too hard to make these from scratch.

I started by adding the ingredients to a mixing bowl. I normally try to stay away from onions, but I know, I know, they add a lot of flavor.

Did you know you can use a garlic press without taking off the skin of the clove? You have to make sure you clean it out after each one, and some are pretty difficult to squeeze, but it works! My sister and I have competitions on who can squeeze out the largest one without asking Mom for help.

Once the eggs were added, I have to admit, I was starting to wonder if I would like these Asian meatballs.

Although I used a wooden spoon to mix the meat, there was no way of getting around using my hands to make the meatballs. So I washed up and dug in.

I know enough about ground beef to know that it can have a good amount of fat in it and sometimes it gets messy while it cooks. With this in mind, I used heavy-duty aluminum foil to line the baking sheet before I placed them on for cooking.

I was glad I did! What a mess this would have been to clean up.

Should You Use the Crock Pot?

This first recipe had you take the meatballs and add them to a crock pot with all of the sauce ingredients and cook it for 2 hours. Although dinner was a bit late, we decided to follow the directions.

However, our meatballs were pretty dry by the time they were done. I am assuming this was because we used beef instead of pork? They still tasted good with my beloved rice, but it went on the list for a second experiment.

2nd Experiment with Fancy Asian Meatballs

The next time we made this, we used the same meatball recipe and decided to use something new for the sauce.

This was just what we were looking for. Why do we call them fancy? Once we put them in the bowl and added some sesame seeds, we thought this looked just like a meal from a restaurant. You could also put these on a platter with toothpicks and serve them as an appetizer with extra sauce on the side. Of course, then I wouldn’t get my rice.