Mozzarella Stuffed Meatballs

Mozzarella Stuffed Meatballs over Spaghetti Squash.

(image courtesy of makeitandlove.blogspot.com)

I stumbled across this recipe the today and decided, "what the heck, I can make that!" I was lucky enough to have the ingredients, more or less, on hand. I made due a little, but didn't compromise the integrity of the meal. Seriously. These are great.
The meatball recipe is from Pioneer Woman, click here. And the whole meal idea and squash recipe is from Ashley at Make it and Love it.
I made this for dinner and it was a huge, enormous, wonderful SUCCESS!
Although, I also cooked up some bow tie noodles. Pasta is always, without fail, a hit for the 4 and under crowd at my home. So just to be safe, I added that to the menu.
Total it took one hour to prepare the meal, frozen ground beef to sit down and eat.

I just happened to have a spaghetti squash sitting  forlornly in the bottom drawer of my refrigerator. And I keep ground beef on hand, and pasta and sauce too of course, otherwise the kids might starve...
So I had only about one pound of ground beef, instead of the 1 and 1/2 so I adjusted the recipe accordingly. Also, my bread crumbs were of the plain variety. So I added my own spice mixture to make them "Italian." I did a dash and a pinch of each of these; sage, marjoram, rosemary, oregano, garlic powder, onion powder, seasoned salt, and fresh chopped basil! Also the recipe called for fresh parsley. I just added some dry. It doesn't taste much, it's just for show and the fresh basil covered that.
Also, I didn't have fresh mozzarella. That's a shame, because I'm pretty sure it would be awesome. So I used what I had. String cheese. Yes, I chopped up two string cheese sticks to use as my meatball centers. They were yummy.
Oh, and one more thing, I didn't have worcestershire sauce. Too bad. They were awesome anyway. It calls for only just a teaspoon anyway. So I fudged there and it was fine. See, you too can make a recipe work without a trip to the grocery store!
The spaghetti squash was surprisingly good, and it's a really low-calorie alternative to pasta. Probably not much less fat with the butter I added while it was baking though. And surprise, pasta sauce is really good on spaghetti squash!
My quash came with a sweet little label with cooking instructions, so I followed those and Ashley's. I sliced my squash in half, put them cut-side down on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper (that stuff is awesome) and cooked them for 45 min at 400. Then I flipped them over, added butter to the hollowed out inside and lowered the temp to 350 because I was putting the meatballs in the oven right then too. I cooked both for about 10 minutes and the squash was done the same time as the meatballs. Perfect.
I added some grapes and called it a meal.
Share your favorite not-too-hard recipe with me. I am always looking for new things to make for dinner!