It's Italian Night at our house.

Let's make meatballs.

[music playing] Support for Amy Labelle's "Cooking with Kids" is provided by AutoFair; Cook, Little, Rosenblatt & Manson; DF Richard Energy; Granite State Development Corporation; New England Dairy; Northeast Delta Dental; Stonyfield Organic; Unitil; Enterprise Bank; White Mountains Community College; Monadnock Food Co-op; Macaroni Kid Seacoast; and viewers like you.

Thank you.

Hi there.

I'm Amy Labelle from Labelle Winery, and I'm a winemaker.

But I also really love to cook, and I especially love to cook with my friends and my family.

And we invite you today into our kitchen to learn how to make meatballs with us today.

I'm joined by my son Jackson and our friend Izzy, and we want to teach you this great recipe that you're going to use over and over and over again.

So, when I make meatballs at home-- and I have these two growing boys.

I've got another son named Lucas.

They eat all the meatballs in the house all the time.

So, when I make meatballs and I make this recipe, I double it, or I triple it, so I can have a whole bunch in the freezer for whenever people are hungry.

I can just throw them into sauce, and we can make a whole bunch of fun things with them.

And we'll talk a little bit more later about how many different kinds of things you can do with meatballs and all kinds of ideas that we have.

So let's get started.

Grab your ingredients.

I hope you have your recipe from online so you can follow right along.

This isn't a hard recipe.

Again, it's something that you can totally accomplish at home.

It's a great recipe to start with, and it's a great way to get your feet wet cooking.

So, in your recipe, it calls for 1/2 a pound of beef-- it's ground beef-- and 1/2 a pound of pork.

So you've got your beef and pork.

The pork is a little bit lighter in color.

If you don't have ground pork and you can't find any at the store or whatever, that's fine, too.

You can make them all out of ground beef.

I do that quite frequently.

And you can mix in-- there are millions of recipes for meatballs, and there's no right way to make a meatball.

You can make it what you like, which is the nice thing about cooking at home and cooking for yourself.

You can really tailor those recipes to be just what you like.

But I think my family likes this blend the best.

They're half and half-- half beef, half pork-- and that works for my family.

But first you've got to get some breadcrumbs really nice and wet, so we're going to do that today.

If you have breadcrumbs, you can use them.

That's what we're using today.

So these are your breadcrumbs.

They already have a little bit of seasoning in them.

You can use Panko breadcrumbs.

You can use seasoned Italian breadcrumbs.

Or, if you don't have breadcrumbs in the house-- and this is what I do a lot.

You know the end of the bread loaf?

The ends?

Because not everybody likes the ends, so you always have those left over in the bag.

Don't throw those away.

They're so valuable.

I always save up all the bread ends.

Or, if I have bread that's getting a little bit stale, and it's not so good anymore, what should we do with it?

Make it into breadcrumbs.

Absolutely.

And in this case, you don't even have to crush them up in the Cuisinart or anything to make breadcrumbs in advance.

You can just throw a whole slice of bread in the bottom of this bowl.

You can throw your milk over it and use it just like that.

We'll mush it up with our hands.

So if you have bread that's left over-- oh, and if you have bread that's left over, but you're not ready to make meatballs, you can put that in a freezer bag and pop it in your freezer.

It freezes beautifully, and it will keep until you're ready to use it.

So I usually have a bag of leftover bread ends or leftover croissants or bread pieces that we didn't finish or didn't need.

They're always hanging out in the freezer, ready for me to make breadcrumbs or meatballs or bread pudding or whatever I need a little bit of bread filling for, like meatloaf.

Oh, this recipe also works really good for meatloaf.

So if you wanted to put this in a loaf pan, you can pop it in the oven and cook off a whole meatloaf for your family, too.

And if you're old enough, and this is something you can do on your own, it would be a really nice thing for you to surprise your family with-- a whole, completed dinner, right?

I think you could handle this on your own, right?

Maybe.

[laughter] Well, maybe after today.

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

We're going to get to it.

And you can handle this, right?

Probably.

You're going to make meatloaf for dinner tomorrow?

Maybe.

All right.

Good.

So let's take our breadcrumbs.

We'll put them in the bottom of the bowl.

All right?

All your breadcrumbs.

OK?

It's good to try to be neat when we cook so we have lots of room at the end.

Now, this is a crazy, surprising ingredient, but we're using milk.

This is whole milk.

It isn't skim milk or fat-free milk.

If that's all you have on hand, that's totally fine, but I like to use something with a little fat in it, and the whole milk has, I think, 8% milk fat, something like that.

And then, increasingly, you've got fat-free milk that has no fat, then it goes up in levels of fat.

When you get to whole, it's got a really nice mouth feel.

It gives it some richness of flavor.

And if you wanted to go even crazier, you could use half-and-half or heavy cream.

But whole milk is just fine for this use.

I'm not a doctor.

I won't tell you to eat fat, but I think it's delicious.

So pour your milk in.

You want to mix that around a little bit with one hand.

Try to keep one hand clean if you can.

Try.

So we'll mix that in a little bit.

And now let's find our oil.

There's yours, up in the corner.

There's yours.

So we're going to pour in some oil.

This is olive oil.

But if you don't have olive oil on hand, you can certainly use vegetable oil or canola oil-- anything but peanut oil, probably.

I think peanut oil would taste a little funny in meatballs.

Whatever you have on hand is fine.

So now you see how that's getting all nice and mixed in.

So it looks a little like crumbly sand, like a little bit of wet sand in there.

That's all mixed in.

Now, like I said, this is a super easy recipe, so pretty much everything else can go right in the bowl, and we're going to mix it all up.

So let's pop our meat in.

Why not?

Go for it.

Should we put all of it?

Yeah.

Go ahead.

You can crumble it up a little bit if you want, or whatever.

We're going to mix it all up with our hands anyway.

So yucky, right?

It's fun to cook with your hands, though.

I think it's fun to get messy.

We're going to put all the ingredients in in a minute, but you each have to take an egg.

So hold on to your egg.

Here's your egg.

And I want to show you a trick.

So everybody has to put one egg into this recipe, all right?

Now, something I learned a long time ago on PBS, watching Jacques Pepin, was to crack an egg.

You don't want to crack it on the side of a bowl, because that makes the pieces really tiny.

When you crack something on a sharp edge, and you get tiny little pieces, you're more likely to get it in your recipe.

So, when you open it, they'll fall out into your recipe, and then you have to spend 20 minutes digging out little pieces of eggshell.

So when I watched Jacques Pepin-- I learned a long time ago on PBS to crack on a flat surface.

So you just give it one good, sharp crack on a flat surface.

That makes the pieces big.

Go ahead.

Did you ever crack an egg before?

Yeah, but I'm very bad at it.

[laughing] It's all right.

You can't go wrong.

Good job.

And you put your thumbs in there and open it right up.

Nice job.

Look at that.

You did it!

You did it.

How about you?

You're good?

Yeah.

I did it.

All right.

Let's put all our shells over here.

Awesome.

OK.

So now we have an egg in there, and we've got gooey meat to roll around.

And let's put in everything else.

We've got our-- Everything?

--onions.

These are chopped white onions just diced really small.

Maybe, if you're not ready to use a knife yet, you can get an adult to help you with that part.

But that's just some chopped onions.

If you don't have chopped onions, you could use scallions, which are tall, green onions.

You could use purple onions if you don't have white.

And if you don't have any onions, you can put in onion powder from your herb cabinet.

All right.

I've got some fresh parsley here.

Look at this fresh parsley.

It's so beautiful.

This is not dried.

This was fresh-ground.

And it smells so good.

It's really fresh.

It smells like the garden.

Oh, that does smell good.

It's nice, right?

All right.

That cooks up really nice.

And then we've got some dried herbs I'll show you.

You can dump those right in.

We've got oregano and basil.

And you know what?

If you have herbs in your cabinet that you haven't used in a long time, it's really useful to switch those out.

Use them up.

They should really get used within a year or so if they're dried in your cabinet.

Otherwise, they're not quite as tasty as they could be.

And then-- Do we put all of them here?

--this one's basil.

Yep.

You're dumping everything right in.

Cool.

That's basil.

Salt, too?

Salt, too.

So, basil.

We've got some garlic powder and onion powder.

We've got our salt.

And I do prefer to not use iodized salt when I'm cooking, when I'm going to heat something up, especially.

I think iodized salt can taste a little bit metallic, so I like to use-- this is a kosher flake salt.

Look how beautiful it is.

It's all big, flaky, beautiful pieces.

But I really like sea salt in these kinds of recipes, too.

Sea salt has such great flavor.

You can actually use a lot less of it.

So you're not killing yourself with sodium, but you still get all the great flavor.

So, fresh sea salt.

And if you grow up and decide that you're really into cooking, you can study all about sea salt and how they come from different parts of the world and different parts of the country.

And you can decide that you really love sea salt from the seas of France or from the Baltic Sea.

They all have different colors, and they all have different flavors.

It's a really fascinating thing to learn about.

And this was Parmesan cheese.

That's my last ingredient.

Boom.

So if you have Parmesan, that's great.

If you have a block of Parmesan, you can grate it and put it into your recipe that way.

You can use shredded.

Whatever you have on hand.

And you know what?

If you don't have Parmesan, you can substitute some other cheeses.

I made meatballs a couple weeks ago for these guys, and I didn't have Parmesan, so I put in mozzarella, and nobody noticed.

That was good.

Did you notice?

Nope, I did not.

See?

[laughter] So you use what you have on hand.

It doesn't have to be so specific.

It doesn't have to be complicated.

So we're just folding these in.

I'm using my fingers.

I want to grab all those ingredients at the bottom and just get them all incorporated there.

Are you mixed in?

Almost.

I guess, if you really wanted to, you could put in the hardest-to-pronounce ingredient, Worcestershire sauce, which is in a little bottle in your fridge sometimes.

That's a common ingredient in meatballs, but I don't think this recipe needs it.

All right.

So this doesn't have to be overworked.

One thing you don't want to do is overwork a recipe with ground beef in it or ground pork.

You dropped it.

Oh, thanks.

No man down.

I don't want to lose any of that good stuff.

You don't want to overwork ground beef or pork.

I think it makes it tough when you cook it.

So now I'm going to set this aside, and I'm going to get a baking tray, and we can make our meatballs.

Let's cooperate, and I'll put them on the same tray, OK?

OK. All right.

I'll put it this way so you can reach.

So let's make-- you can choose here, too.

You've got a lot of choices.

You can make teeny-tiny baby-- actually, you could make teeny, teeny-tiny baby ones, like this big, and you could put them in soup.

I love those because then you can make Italian wedding soup or the little meatball chickarina stuff.

Like meatball soup.

Yeah, a little meatball soup.

Those are fun.

They're bite-size, and they fit in a spoon.

But today, I think we should-- well, you could go the total opposite direction.

You could make an enormous meatball.

[laughter] You could do like this.

The trouble with enormous meatballs is that they take an awful lot of time to cook.

And the outside gets cooked before the inside, so you can do that.

You have to cook them a little lower in the oven, then, and that's all right, too.

But I think, today, maybe we'll go for golf-ball-sized.

What do you think?

OK. Good idea.

Does that work for you?

Sounds pretty good.

OK.

These cook pretty evenly.

They're pretty universally loved.

They work in spaghetti and meatballs.

They work in meatball subs.

And my family really likes to have meatballs over rice, which isn't as common, but we think it's yummy.

I like them with cheese sauce, but my family likes them with tomato sauce.

Actually, my husband likes them with no sauce.

So he likes plain-- he eats them with salad and a banana.

Everybody has to just do what they like, you know?

Everybody's an individual.

You want to eat bananas with your meatballs?

You should do that, right?

Yeah.

Anyway, bananas are good for you, so it's all good.

So we're going to make our little tray of meatballs here.

And I've got the oven on 350 degrees, and we're going to pop these right in there.

We want to roast off these meatballs first, before we use them in any of the recipes.

So what I do is I roast off three or four trays full of these meatballs, and then I put half of them in the freezer when they cool down, and I save those for another time.

You can scoot it in there.

We'll find room for him.

He's good.

There you go.

Oh, yeah.

You can do that, too.

Keep going.

You can put a few more.

So, anyway, you can roast these all off, and then they're ready to use in whatever recipe or any way you want to.

And so I would put these in a 350-degree oven for maybe 25 minutes if they're about this size.

If they're bigger, you're going to have to take a little longer.

One thing you can do is use a thermometer at your house to make sure that your meat is getting cooked to a safe temperature, because having meat cooked to the right temperature is important safety stuff, so we want to make sure these are totally safe to eat.

And so, if you are cooking these, you could put your thermometer to the deepest part of the middle.

And if you registered to be 140 degrees, 145 degrees, you'd know you're good to go.

So that's another way to check.

These are getting super crowded, though.

And it's a good thing to talk about, because if we make these really crowded, they're going to have a hard time cooking-- the sides, especially.

So I'm going to take that giant one out.

[laughter] He's coming out.

He's going to go on the second round.

Sounds good?

All right.

These look good.

I'm going to pop these in the oven.

And I'm going to take out a few that we already prepared so you can see what they're going to look like.

Let's put these in the oven.

And I'll get this one out.

Now, these are done.

I just made a few so we could see.

These are nicely roasted.

They're brown.

These are a little smaller, right?

These are browned.

They look good.

At this point, you can decide what you want to do with them.

So you can say, well, I feel like a meatball sub today, right?

So then you would put them in sauce in a pan, just like this.

And if you want to make your own sauce, too, which I highly recommend if you can do it-- we'll put a recipe on the website for that as well, so you can check that out.

But if you have a can of sauce or a jar of sauce, and you want to use that, that's perfectly fine, too.

So this is some marinara sauce that we made.

We'll post that recipe.

And do you want to make a couple of meatball subs?

Yeah.

Here you go.

Here.

I'll let you go first.

You can take one of those.

Take some tongs, or the spoon.

Either way.

Whatever's easier for you.

And you can have this one.

And just put how many meatballs in?

How many meatballs can you eat?

Three?

Yeah, I'll put three in.

All right, perfect.

That sounds good.

You want cheese on top?

No, thank you.

OK, not today.

So there's your meatballs sub.

And you can do one.

Another thing you can do, obviously, is the time-old, aged spaghetti meatballs, right?

Ooh, yeah.

Of course.

And really, your imagination is the only thing holding you back.

Use them for whatever you want.

You might like them plain.

One of my sons likes to just eat them with buttered noodles, so it's all good.

So that's meatballs.

And we really thank you for coming into our kitchen today and helping us learn how to make meatballs.

[music playing] You confident now?

You feel like you can make meatballs?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're good?

Yeah, I think I am.

Well, thanks for joining us today, and we'll see you next time.

I hope you make this recipe with people that you love many, many times over, and we'll see you again soon.

Bye.

[laughter] Support for Amy Labelle's "Cooking with Kids" is provided by AutoFair; Cook, Little, Rosenblatt & Manson; DF Richard Energy; Granite State Development Corporation; New England Dairy; Northeast Delta Dental; Stonyfield Organic; Unitil; Enterprise Bank; White Mountains Community College; Monadnock Food Co-op; Macaroni Kid Seacoast; and viewers like you.

Thank you.

[music playing]