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I spied this delicious looking picture of pork meatballs in a tomato sauce and oozing with hunks of Mozzarella cheese. As usual with my style of cooking you follow the general look and recipe with what you have on hand and it ends up as your own version.

 I also tend to add what I think looks right so dont always have the exact measurements of what I used. Generally with fresh herbs from the garden you can't go too far wrong as too much doesn't seem to overdo things like dried herbs can.

Tomato Sauce.

I made the tomato sauce the day before 

 A splash or two of olive oil

Tomatoes diced with skin on, I think I used 8 to 10 med to large ones 

2 smallish onions diced

3 to 4 cloves garlic finely chopped 

salt and pepper to taste

brown sugar to taste

a handful of basil finely chopped 

Firstly pan fry off the onions and garlic in the olive oil until they are translucent then add the tomatoes and cook on a med low heat until they have softened through. Add salt and pepper to taste and cook the tomato mixture until soft and sauce like but still retain some of their diced look. At this point I tasted and added a small amount of brown sugar to reach the desired sweetness then added the basil last. 

 Cool the sauce and keep until ready and pour over the meatballs.

 Meat Balls

I had quite a bit of mince and sausage meat so you may have to adjust the amount of herbs etc to suit the proportions that you are making. The pork sausage meat holds the mince together so you end up with quite firm meatballs that have a great flavour.

pork sausage meat 

beef mince 

lemon zest of a lemon

nutmeg 1 to 2 teaspoons

thyme 

basil 

parsley 

3 to 4 garlic cloves finely chopped 

salt and pepper 

chilli flakes or fresh chilli finely chopped

 mozzarella cheese

Mix all together well and make into small meatballs around the size of a large walnut or slightly bigger and cook off either in the fry pan or in the oven. I sprayed an oven tray with some spray on cooking oil and baked them all at once in the oven.

I then combined both trays together and poured over the tomato sauce that I had made the previous day

I then cut slices of mozzarella cheese and laid out on top like a grid and then baked in the oven on a moderate heat until the cheese was looking golden and molten and rich tomato sauce was oozing through in between.  approx 30 to 40 minutes

 I have to say this was delicious 

To that end I made the meatball recipe again and shallow stuffed some taper peppers that we had grown and had an abundance of.

Cook them off in a moderate oven and I added a bottle of tomato paste/ sauce that we had preserved from the previous summer. Top off with some mozzarella just like above and again nice presentation and very tasty

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Wairere Nursery
826 Gordonton Road, R D 1, Hamilton 3281 Ph: (07) 824 3430 Email: