Ok – you’re right, Thanksgiving was a while ago and I’m just now asking about it, but listen people – you should know what you’re getting when you come here by now. I’m busy – been extra busy at the shop trying to stay on top of the action.

So let’s rewind it back to Thanksgiving – Actually, my story come from prior to Thanksgiving, we had a ‘Friendsgiving’ where we had dinner with some good friends, and repped properly with some experimental dishes we’d been wanting to try. I wanted to do a smoked component obviously, and for whatever reason – I had never heard of this before – but my brain came up with a crazy idea:

Bacon-Wrapped Sausage Meatballs Stuffed with Stuffing and Gravy.  – Now, this sounds crazy, but as you’ll see – it’s not too hard to pull off!

Friendsgiving was going to happen on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, so I started putting this together on Thursday. Reason being: The gravy. Behold – you’re basic bitch Chicken Gravy from Save-a-lot.

You’re right, I could have made my own from scratch, but screw that – plus I am familiar with the packet stuff, and know that I wanted to make a slightly thicker gravy than usual. The packet stuff would allow this to be easily achieved without much guesswork.

Now, how the heck do you get gravy into a sausage meatball? I guess you could make the ball, then use an marinade injector filled with gravy to do it – but I’d be worried about springing a leak or it just not working right. My solution: gravy ice cubes. I didn’t want a ton of gravy in them, I just wanted enough so that if you bit into them you’d say ‘holy fuck there’s gravy in these?!’ So I used the smallest cube tray we had, which is the space invaders cube tray.

And into the freezer overnight they went. Flash forward to the next evening when assembly and smoking was going down – How did the gravy ice cubes turn out???

PERFECT:

At this point, I want to apologize at how weird and slimy my hands are going to look in the next batch of images. when you’re working with Sausage, stuffing and frozen gravy – things get weird – you’re gonna deal with it.

So I let the cubes sit in the freezer so they were as cold as possible for when I needed them. In the meantime, I prepped two pounds of tube style mild pork sausage meat with some egg, bread crumbs, and… that was it really.

The first step was to get a disk of meat together – I think I weighed a pile of meat that was a quarter pound – I’m not 100% sure, but I did weigh them – for consistency sake.

Then the stuffing:

Then a cube:

Then I slowly worked the sausage up over the two fillings. (hands look grossss!)

Then I worked the sausage until it was a ball shape!

After that, they got a single wrap of bacon – and went on standby. Bacon helps ingredients stay put when you’ve stuffed ground meats with stuff. It also tightens as it cooks, so even if you wrap something a little sloppy, it will constrict on the product and look tightly wound at the end – there is no need to use toothpicks – unless you’re doing filet mignon or something where the initial adhesion might not be all that swell.

I let the balls sit in the refrigerator over night, and decided to smoke them on Saturday morning with some baby back ribs! Look at that action!

I let the balls go for about 3 hours at 225ish.

Look at those soliders!

Let’s look at one close up:

nugget of joy –  I should call them ‘Thanksgiving Geodes’ – haha.

I put them in the fridge overnight and warmed them up in the tray on Friendsgiving Day, covered with foil, with a little water in the bottom… I served them up, and they all disappeared.

Hope you try this some day! I’d love to see pics!