COOKBOOK REVIEW:  Meatballs, and what to do with them

The title of the book is "101 Things To Do With Meatballs." So you can imagine my disappointment.

I'm imagining the suggestions will be along the lines of "leave them out for a week and use as golf balls," or "press them in place around windows as putty," or "paint them white and give them to friends as novelty ping-pong balls that don't bounce."

But "101 Things To Do With Meatballs" turns out to be a cookbook. Oh.

Writer Stephanie Ashcraft has an intriguing idea: Keep frozen meatballs on hand for whenever you want to make a dinner that is quick and hassle-free. With a relatively limited number of other ingredients, you can dress them up to resemble other meals.

But many of the recipes she comes up with cannot, in good conscience, be called "recipes."

For her Swedish Meatball Hero, she heats frozen meatballs with brown beef gravy out of a jar and puts them on a hoagie bun. Her Open-Faced Meatball Sub heats frozen meatballs with spaghetti sauce out of a jar, puts them on a hoagie bun and then sprinkles grated mozzarella cheese over them. For her Cheesy Meatballs, she steams the frozen meatballs and dumps them in melted Cheez Whiz. A garnish of sliced green onions is optional.

These dishes may be perfectly edible, depending on the quality of the stuff in a jar, but can Ashcraft really justify putting them in a cookbook? Would you pay 10 bucks for this recipe for Pesto Spaghetti and Meatballs: Cook spaghetti, add a jar of pesto, add a jar of spaghetti sauce heated with frozen meatballs, and sprinkle with grated mozzarella cheese?

Ashcraft is trying to come up with new ways to cook comfort food, but they just aren't new enough. Her guiding principle is to use reheated frozen meatballs in any recipe that would otherwise use ground beef.

Her recipe for Instant Soft Tacos, for instance, tosses meatballs in a tortilla with cheese, salsa, guacamole and sour cream -- she doesn't even season it like a taco. Her Baked Ziti and Meatballs bakes ziti with meatballs, a jar of spaghetti sauce and grated cheese.

Some of her recipes are slightly more involved, including several that do not use a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup. We decided to try the Crowd-Pleasing Meatball Chili, which resembled other chilis, only with less liquid and a lot less flavor (only one to two tablespoons of chili powder are used for 16 servings).

Ashcraft has now written 13 of these cookbooks, each with 101 things you can do with cake mixes, chocolate, canned soup, chicken, ground beef and more. Her first book, the cake mix book, was actually on the New York Times' bestseller list. But she has now made more than 1,300 recipes. Perhaps she just ran out of ideas.

Daniel Neman writes for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.