Spaghetti and Meatballs and Homemade Buttermilk Ranch Dressing

I promise, I'm still here. I know the posts have been a little scarce, but it's been an insane month. We've had several neighborhood birthdays, which gave me a great excuse to open up our home and cook and cook and cook. We've also been snowed in or iced over 3 times since Christmas, which isn't the norm for Eastern North Carolina. It all adds up to insanity around our house with the kids being home a grand total of 2 extra weeks and so many people around! I've also been so fortunate in regards to The Washington Magazine, not only was I lucky enough to be featured in a 5 page article about my love of cooking and this blog, but I also get to prepare the food every other month for photographs of the recipes featured in every edition. Oh! And how could I forget cake for 250 people! I got a chance to say thank you to so many of hard working City of Washington employees and make 5 huge sheet cakes for their annual appreciation luncheon. That took every bit of 2 days of mixing, baking, frosting.

All of this activity prompted me to write this post....how to cook real food when there's so little time and also, some great grocery store deals to help you feel better about what you're feeding your family.

Great grocery stores out here in the middle of nowhere are in no way easy to get to. Over the past month, I've been lucky enough, twice, to find myself 2 hours west of here in Raleigh and gotten to stock up at Trader Joe's and Costco. However, a little closer to home, we have The Fresh Market in Greenville, about a 30 minute drive. It's a high end, pretty pricey gourmet and specialty food grocery store, but if you go for the sales and not all of your normal grocery shopping, it's so worth the trip for quality ingredients! Their newest promotion is a Thursday only special, but its fantastic! It's everything you need for a fantastic and quick weeknight dinner of all REAL FOOD for $20. This month's feature is spaghetti and meat sauce and I couldn't have been happier with our dinner!

By the way, this post isn't sponsored in any way (although, hey! Fresh Market! I'd love to write about your food in exchange for groceries!), just a great tip for REAL FOOD quick dinners on a budget.

So....for $20 this month on Thursdays you get 1 lb of lean ground sirloin, 1 lb of organic spaghetti, 1 jar of organic sweet basil spaghetti sauce, 1 french baguette, 1 jar of garlic salt, 2 bags of organic romaine salad mix, and 1 huge container of cut mixed tropical fresh fruit. It would easily feed 5 or 6 people.


Using this special, I'm giving you guys the recipes for my awesome mini meatballs and homemade ranch dressing. My kids are crazy about ranch dressing (like almost every other kid) but after reading the back of a Hidden Valley bottle, I cringed every time they asked for it. This prompted me to look up several ranch dressing recipes and design my own. It was a hit! Hooray for cool, tangy, creamy ranch with fillers and no preservatives! Time to get cooking! Recipes after the break!

Mini Meatballs

1 lb lean ground beef

1/2 cup bread crumbs

1 egg

1 tsp dried Italian herbs

1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan

1 tsp garlic salt

1/4 freshly ground black pepper

Add all of the ingredients to a decent sized mixing bowl. With clean hands, dig in! Mix all of the ingredients together with your hands (its so much easier than trying to use a spoon). Pinch off a little bit of the mixture (about a teaspoon or 2) and roll it into a ball with your hands. Repeat, repeat, repeat....

If you use lean ground beef for these, you can just dump the lot into a pot of waiting simmering spaghetti sauce and they cook in about 10 to 15 minutes. Easy peasy and pretty quick. My 7 year old and I knocked out this whole meal in about 30 minutes. He rolled out the meatballs while I started the pasta water, cut and buttered the garlic bread, and doctored up the jar of spaghetti sauce and got it bubbling.

Check out the ingredient lists for The Fresh Market tomato and basil sauce and the spaghetti noodles! All real food and no preservatives!

Time to throw the salad together and make the ranch dressing!

Homemade Buttermilk Ranch Dressing

1/2 cup full fat buttermilk

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1 tsp garlic salt

1 tsp onion powder

1/2 tsp smoked sweet paprika

tiny shake of cayenne pepper

1 tsp sea salt

2 tsp sugar or honey

1 tsp dried parsley

Combine all of your ingredients in a bowl and mix together. I used an immersion blender, but you could definitely use a large whisk or a regular hand mixer.

That's it. Seriously. No need to pay $5 for bottled ranch dressing loaded with chemicals ever again.

Feel free to add in whatever flavors you like to this recipe, it's pretty versatile and forgiving. Throw in some crumbled bacon for Bacon Ranch or some freshly grated parm for Parmesan Ranch or even some extra cayenne and some dried chipotles for Chipotle Ranch.

With about 30-45 minutes invested in throwing this together, its a quick dinner, you can feel great about. No boxed mixes, no preservatives, no chemicals and no processed food!

This is the awesome tub of cut tropical fruit that comes with special. You could make a quick ginger lime simple syrup so serve with it or just hand out forks and let everybody go to town.  What a perfect desert! With the leftovers (minus the melon), we're having awesome tropical fruit smoothies this afternoon. 

For leftovers, we've got a small bag of garlic bread that I'm going to make croutons out of for salads later this week, a whole bag of salad mix, enough spaghetti and mini meatballs for probably 3 or 4 decent sized servings and about half of the fruit. So, for a family of 4, this is easily 2 full meals for $20. Win!