Saturday was my Bunco night and with all of the cleaning, I didn’t have time to get to the grocery like I had planned. I asked Grizzly to go to the grocery with me to buy a couple of bags of meatballs.
“Why don’t you make some meatballs?” he asked me.
Okay, good point.
This is what I did:
- 1 lb. bacon burger venison
- 1 lb. plain ground venison
- 1 lb. ground antelope
- splash of Worcestershire
- seasoning of choice
- plain bread crumbs
- 2 bottles of store-bought barbecue sauce
I thawed the packages of meat and threw them in a mixing bowl together. Wearing rubber gloves, I mixed all the meat together. It was really squishy so I added bread crumbs until the meat started to stick together. I used a small Pampered Chef scoop so the meatballs were the right size.
The most time-consuming part was browning the meatballs. Something about putting them in the crockpot completely raw did not appeal to me, so I did brown them. I sprayed the crockpot with nonstick spray, added some barbecue sauce (I used Joe Horn‘s Bayou Classic) and layered in the meatballs. Two bottles of barbecue sauce was not going to fill the crockpot, nor does all of the sauce come out of the bottle. After emptying the bottle, I like to add a little water to the sauce bottle and swish it around. Then the water goes in the crockpot. It thins the barbecue sauce a little. I covered the whole mess and set the crockpot on high for 5 hours. Everything cooked all the way through, which was my main concern.
I’m really glad it worked out, because I’ve been craving a meatball sub!
By the way, I had a half of a jelly jar of apple syrup in the fridge and I actually put some of that in, too. Sometimes adding grape jelly to a spicy ketchup helps to tone it down, so this was an experiment that I hoped would work and this did.
What’s your favorite party recipe?
~ Katie
I’m going to try this out this weekend, but with plain ole cow meat. I don’t have any antelope in the freezer (it’s weird to me that you do!) Any suggestions on the seasonings?
Do you still have that seasoning Russ bought for burgers? That would be good. Some Tony Chachere’s, or maybe some garlic salt? What do you like in your burgers? Or if you want to do an Italian thing, use Italian seasoning and replace the BBQ sauce with Spaghetti sauce
I have antelope because Karl and Janice gave us one as a thank-you for puppy-sitting while they went on a hunting trip out west lol. To me it’s better than cow!