Easy Weeknight Dinner Idea: Meatball Sandwiches

I didn’t do much cooking this summer. And by “not much” I mean “almost none.”

Generally speaking, I don’t like cooking in the summer, and this year I was especially unmotivated because the four of us were often in different places. Sometimes even on different continents (our daughter was studying abroad).

But something about fall makes me want to get back into the kitchen, and this fall is going to involve lots of meatballs.

It’s all because of homecoming.

Last month was my son’s senior homecoming dance and, like many teenage boys, he and his group of friends put off making a restaurant reservation.

And then they put it off some more.

At the last minute they agreed to do something the moms had been asking them to do for a while: have dinner at one of our houses.

One of Grant’s friend’s parents graciously, patiently, generously offered to host at their home. They rented a tent and tables and cloth tablecloths. They even took care of all the food, save for one item: meatballs.

The meatballs were my department. Meatballs for 36.

Since my parents were in town, and things were a little crazy at my house, my dad offered to go to Costco for me to pick up some meatballs. (I worked my parents pretty hard this trip. Wonder when they’ll be back?)

Not knowing how big the meatballs were or how many were in a bag, I told him to get four bags, thinking I’d err on the side of plenty and keep any that were left over.

Turns out I used a bag and a half. If you’re doing the math, you realize that leaves two and half bags of frozen meatballs still in my freezer.

All for our personal use.

Now I can use them for spaghetti and meatballs, that’s a given.

And my assignment for dinner club this month is appetizers, so I’m thinking some kind of appetizer meatball will be involved.

It’s right about here that I start to run out of ideas, except for one that I made for dinner this week: meatball sandwiches.

It’s a real stretch to call what I’m about to share a recipe. Here are the ingredients:

• Meatballs
• Red pasta sauce
• Hoagie buns
• Thin slices of cheese (Any kind you want. I used provolone.)

You can fancy this up as much as you want by making homemade versions of the above, or you can do what I did and go premade for everything.

Since I know how smart you are, I’ll let you figure out how to heat up the meatballs, add the sauce, put them in the bun, and melt cheese on top.

But as simple as this is, I can tell you that your family will probably think this is a pretty cool dinner. Unless meatball sandwiches are already regularly on your menu.

And while I have you here, I wanted to share a couple of shots of these lucky kids having their homecoming dinner under the tent.

The parents acted as servers, which was really fun.

And even though the picture below is a bit blurry, I wanted to include it because the tent became especially festive as the sun went down.

I’m so glad those silly boys procrastinated on making dinner reservations. But if you have any meatball ideas, could you send them my way?