Warm spices are used in this recipe for gingerbread cookies. For your holiday celebrations, you can cut the dough into any shape you like!
| Prep Time: | 25 mins |
| Cook Time: | 20 mins |
| Additional Time: | 1 hr |
| Total Time: | 1 hr 45 mins |
| Servings: | 24 |
| Yield: | 24 servings |
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
- 5 shallots, minced
- 2 pounds ground lamb
- 1 cup fresh bread crumbs
- ¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
- 1 egg, lightly beaten
- 2 tablespoons lemon zest
- ½ teaspoon dried marjoram
- salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
- ½ cup unsalted butter
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 2 ½ tablespoons tomato sauce
- ¼ cup wine
- 1 small garlic clove, minced
- 1 dash ground cinnamon
- toothpicks
Instructions
- Melt the 1 tablespoon butter in a skillet over medium heat. Cook and stir the shallots in the skillet until tender. Transfer to a large bowl.
- Mix lamb, bread crumbs, parsley, egg, and lemon zest into the bowl with the shallots. Season with marjoram, salt, and pepper. Let stand 1 hour in the refrigerator.
- Melt 1/2 cup butter and heat olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Form the lamb mixture into small meatballs, and cook in the skillet in batches until evenly brown. Do not drain skillet. Drain meatballs on paper towels, and place in a serving dish.
- Mix tomato sauce, wine, garlic, and cinnamon into the skillet. Cook and stir until well blended and heated through. Drizzle over the meatballs in the dish. Serve with toothpicks.
Nutrition Facts
| Calories | 136 kcal |
| Carbohydrate | 3 g |
| Cholesterol | 45 mg |
| Dietary Fiber | 0 g |
| Protein | 7 g |
| Saturated Fat | 5 g |
| Sodium | 145 mg |
| Sugars | 1 g |
| Fat | 10 g |
| Unsaturated Fat | 0 g |
Reviews
This is a tasty meal, I’ve made it as a main dish rather than a cocktail. But what really makes these meatballs pop is the sauce. They go very well together.
Made these meatballs and added maple flavored sausage to the mix. Adding the cinnamon to the butter made them very aromatic. I did not make the tomato sauce though but plan on saving it to be made later.
I added a teaspoon of caraway seed ground up to it was fantastic
Everyone enjoyed this new meatball. A good, subtle taste. I did not use the sauce but just my regular Italian gravy. Also used lemon juice and dried parsley since no press was available.
The seasonings were good but I decided that I wanted a Roasted Garlic Parmesan sauce with noodles instead of the tomato sauce. This was my first time using ground Lamb. Will try it again with the tomato sauce.
Served these for dinner and loved them. After quickly browning them in a skillet, I put them in a casserole, poured the sauce over, covered the dish, and completed cooking in a 400 oven for 25 minutes. I added a dash of cloves, 1/2 tsp sugar, and one clove of garlic to the tomato sauce recipe – which turned out delicious. I used lemon juice instead of lemon zest, half a small onion and 2 cloves garlic minced instead of shallots, and I moistened the bread with a bit of milk. The meatballs were tender and juicy, the flavors were perfect. This will go in my permanent collection!
Found the meatballs where too bland, but the sauce was delicious.
The meatballs were great but I did make a few changes in the prep and created a different sauce which was absolutely wonderful! And I used my crock pot as well. Here’s what I did…While making the bread crumbs I added the spices at the same time, adding some dried rosemary and using thyme instead of marjoram. I always do this because I find the spices are more evenly distrubuted in the mixture.. I set the timer for 4 hours, went to work and came home to one of the best meals I’ve made in a long time! We chose to serve the dish over mashsed potatoes but rice or pasta would be wonderful too. Can’t wait to eat the leftovers tonight.
I serve 4 meatballs as a small dish main course with a nice green salad.
Delicious!
I changed quite a bit substituting 1/4 onion for shallots and basil and oregano for parsley and margoram. they tasted like a richer beef meatball to me but I love lamb. I think the sauce would be better as a mushroom scampi so I think I will do that next time as the tomatoes and lamb didn’t quite mix to me.
This is a great recipe. I cooked the meatballs in a 375 degree oven for 30 minutes to save cook time and they were so tender and good. I used the recipe for a main dish, with mashed potatoes and steam vegetables.
It was fantastic. My 15 year old son had second helpings. I made it with wild rice and tomato sauce on the side. I used less butter.
This was good. I would make it again, but just the meatball part. Used half shallots, half garlic. We ate it as a main course and liked it. The sauce was a bit strange, though — not making that again.
Lamb has a different taste than beef, so this was a nice change of pace. Good ratio of meat to bread crumbs, too – thanks for getting that right Kathy. Next time I will make MUCH more sauce. I made two batches this time, and preferred the sauce made with white wine. The only drawback to this recipe is that ground lamb was expensive ($13 /lb), and was a bit hard to find. Had to go to a butcher in town because the grocery store only sold lamb chops.
These are very tasty! A nice unique dish. I definitely recommend as an appetizer, rather than a meal, because the taste is intense.
OMG very good recipe it cost much more than ground turkey or beef but its worth every dollar. I added more tomato sauce and 1/3 cup of lemon juice instead of zest and put a lil bit of lemon juice in the sauce as well. Ummmm (Home Simpson voice) it was soo good.
these were ok…
I wanted to serve this with rice as a meal, so I scaled the meatballs down to 6 servings but made the sauce as written. The meatballs were really quite bland, and the wine in the sauce was absolutely overpowering. I ended up adding about half a can of tomato sauce, and even then it wasn’t especially good. I won’t be making this again. Thanks anyway.
I was inspired to make lamb meatballs after watching Harold on Top Chef make some nice spicy lamb sicilian style meatballs. I wanted to make something not so spicy, though, and I found this excellent recipe. Thank you for beating my meatball doldrums!
Very good and easy. I added a little salt at the end. Also, I didn’t have lemon zest so I used a bit of lemon juice…worked out fine. We actually had this for dinner, not cocktails!! Husband really liked it.