Pizza Meatballs on Bed of Mashed Potatoes

Remember last week when I made “too many mashed potatoes“, and we all laughed, because there’s no such thing?

The leftovers form the base of this casserole-type baked meatball dish with pizza sauce and mozzarella cheese. I know what you’re thinking because I thought it, too: pizza mashed potatoes? It works somehow. Plus, there is cheese in every bit of this dish, what’s not to love about that?!

For the meatballs, I used the standard beef-pork mix that gets ground fresh at the supermarket meat counter, and Grana Padano instead of parmesan because I can’t quit my dealer at the farmers market.

The balls are baked, so they won’t get the Maillard-Reaction yumminess, but as there is cheese in every bit of this dish, you won’t miss it. While they bake, mix cheddar cheese and bacon (or here, ham bits) into your leftover mashed potatoes. The original recipe says to use three cups of potato and form twelve balls, but I had five cups and just used it all. They were plenty “loaded” with the mix-ins, as you can see:

Next up: the sauce. The recipe author calls “a can of tomato sauce mixed with some onion and spices” a “marinara sauce”, which I feel is an insult to Italian grandmothers on both sides of the Atlantic. Here I could have saved time and money with a can of ready-to-go pizza sauce from the company that made the can of passata (sauce) that I used here; they are often the same price when on sale. Notes for next time.

(There’s no picture of the sauce because I was too excited.)

Each meatball was topped with a bit of the red sauce, then a “slice of mozzarella.” Mr Radish bought fancy balls of fresh mozzarella, so my slices were uneven and oddly-shaped, and very wet.

Even though the final baked product looks kind of disgusting, the taste was amazing. A.MAZE.ZING. I will be making these again, with the pizza-sauce hack–and not only to use up leftover mashed potatoes.