Mama's Meatballs

Just made Mama's Meatballs last night for dinner -- you know, the meatballs from the show The Restaurant on Bravo?  Anyway, the recipe is actual up on the Bravo site, but I have republished it here:

MAMA'S MEATBALLS
Nicolina Dispirito

Serves 4 as antipasto or over spaghetti
(20 balls)

For the seasoned stock mix:
1/2 cup chicken stock
1/2 large sweet onion
4 cloves garlic
1/2 bunch parsley, chopped

Place all ingredients in blender or food processor and puree.

For the meatballs:
1 lb ground beef
1 lb ground pork
1 lb ground veal
1/2 cup plain breadcrumbs
3 whole eggs
1/2 cup parmigiano-reggiano, grated
2-3 pinches chili flakes
2-3 pinches salt
4 cups marinara

In a large bowl, combine all ingredients (except extra virgin olive oil) with stock mix and mix with both hands
until mixture is uniform. Do not over mix.

Put a little olive oil on hands and form mixture into balls a little larger than golf balls.

Pour about 1/2-inch of extra virgin olive oil into a straight-sided, wide sauté pan and heat over medium-high flame.
Add the meatballs to the pan (working in batches if necessary) and brown meatballs, turning once.

Using a slotted spoon, remove the meatballs from the oil and place them into a saucepan of marinara
(they should be submerged). Simmer for 30 minutes, or until the meatballs are cooked through and tender.
Serve alone or over spaghetti (in which case, increase marinara to 6 cups).

Here are a few additional notes from me:

• Prep time for the meatballs, including making the stock, rolling them, etc. is 20-40 minutes depending on your level of skill in the kitchen.
• The recipe made significantly more than 20 meatballs for me based on the size I was rolling them.
• I reccommend using Progresso Italian Breadcrumbs even though it calls for "plain breadcrumbs" -- just adds a little bit more taste.
• I reccommend using Barilla marinara sauce if you are not going to make your own (2 jars of Barilla will get you to around the amount of sauce you need).  I put the sauce on low when I started my prep and had it close to boiling by the time I started throwing cooked meatballs into it -- it is important that the sauce be hot enough that when it simmers it is actually cooking the meatballs through.
• It can sometimes be hard to find ground veal; I couldn't yesterday, so I just doubled the amount of ground pork and everything tasted great.
• As with all things cooked in oil: do not use too much oil and be very careful of spattering and potential fires.