A Happy Healthy New Year

Happy New Year everyone!  Hope you all had a fun and safe celebration.  As promised, will be bringing you some NY resolution friendly recipes.  Have been busy perusing my healthy eating cookbooks to find new and interesting things to share with you.  This recipe is a merger of three that I came across and thought I'd give it a whirl.

Sweet-n-Sour Cranberry Turkey Meatballs with Brown Rice

Meatballs

1 lb ground turkey
1/2 medium onion, minced
1/2 tsp ground sage (or 1 tbsp fresh)
1/2 tsp dried thyme
2/3 cup breadcrumbs
1/4 Egg Beaters (or other egg substitute)
4 tbsp cranberry relish

For the meatballs, mix all the ingredients together.

Roll mixture into balls, will make either 2 dozen regular-sized meatballs or 3 dozen cocktail meatballs.

Bake in oven at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes (time will vary depending on size).

Sauce

12 oz chili sauce
10 oz cranberry relish
2 tbsp lemon juice

Put ingredients in a saucepan over medium heat.  Stir occasionally with a whisk until they are well blended. 

Brown Rice

1 cup brown rice
2 1/2 cups water
1 tbsp butter or margarine (optional)
1/2 tsp salt (optional)

Bring water to a boil, then add in rice, butter and salt.  Once it starts to boil again, cover and drop temperature and allow to simmer for 45-50 minutes.

When the meatballs are finished baking, pour the sauce over them and coat well.  Serve over brown rice.  I like to serve my with a green of some sort like steamed haricot verdes, a nice leafy salad or for those who like them, some steamed broccoli on the side would do nicely too.

NOTES

In order to make sure everything is ready about the same time, I suggest starting the rice first, then make the meatballs while that is cooking. After the meatballs are in the over, start the sauce. That way everything should be done semi-simultaneously and you'll be ready to serve.

Cooking plain brown rice is a little different from cooking white rice. Brown rice has an extra bran coating around it that requires more liquid and a longer cooking temperature.

You could use ground beef for the meatballs, but ground turkey is lower in fat.  There was little to no run-off when the meatballs were cooking.

I used Ocean Spray Whole Berry Cranberry Sauce (found in the canned fruit section of the grocery store). It has no calories from fat and is low in sodium and sugar.

For those who don't like fruit "in" your meat, you can simply leave out the cranberry relish.  If you do leave it out, you may want to cut back on the breadcrumbs too so that the meatball mixture isn't too dry.

If you don't like cranberries, you can leave out the relish in the meatballs and substitute a grape jelly or currant jelly for the relish in the sauce.