Carolina Cooks: Great balls of cheesy meat

Holy crap. Holycrapholycrapholycrap. I just had the most amazing balls ever.

Stop it.

I'm talking meat balls, kids.

A few factors combined to create this life-altering moment of bliss.

1. My mother has a serious, potentially dangerous addiction to Costco and consequently, brought over 4 pounds of ground turkey meat to store in my freezer.
2. I've become obsessed with reading recipes on Pioneer Woman because she has lots of gorgeous pictures of food that I drool over.
3. Chris is gone all week and he did not hire a ladysitter to cook my meals.

So tonight I decided to do something about all that meat. A tub of blue cheese in the fridge beckoning to me. Called my name.

"Zina. Carolina. eat me. eat me"

And you just can't ever go wrong with meat + cheese. A quick google search led me to this recipe:

Tantalizing Turkey and Blue Cheese Meatballs

Ingredients

4 cloves garlic

1/2 onion, cut into chunks

2 jalapeno peppers, halved and seeded

1 pound ground turkey

3 tablespoons blue cheese

1/2 cup bread crumbs

3 egg whites

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon dried parsley

1 tablespoon Italian seasoning

1 tablespoon ground black pepper

1 teaspoon chili powder


Directions
1.  Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil and set aside.

2.  Pulse garlic cloves in a food processor until minced. Add onion and jalapeno, and pulse until minced again. Scrape the onion mixture into a large bowl along with the turkey, blue cheese, bread crumbs, egg whites, and olive oil. Season with soy sauce, dried parsley, Italian seasoning, pepper, and chili powder. Mix well.

3.  Roll the mixture into 2 inch balls, and place onto prepared baking sheet. Bake in preheated oven until golden brown, and no longer pink in the center, about 25 minutes.

Substitutions: Instead of soy sauce, I used salt and instead of parsley I used basil. I also don't have a food processor (hint, hint Santa) so I just chopped the garlic, onion and jalapeno.

Note: Some of the cheese will ooze out while baking but it still maintains that earthy blue cheesy flavor.

Meatballs with a side of wild rice

I hoped they would be good but oh my God. OH MY GOD. Tantalizing is an understatement. The flavors of the jalapeno, blue cheese and other seasonings combined to create this incredible burst of flavor.  MmmmmmmMmmmmmmMmmmmMmmMmm.

Okay fine I'll stop now. Just make them, for my sake.

Come home Chris, this is getting out of hand.