So when I buy food, it tends to fall into two categories: fresh or near-fresh components for cooking, and some amount of absolute crap for quick meals or snacking.
In the first category, yuckiness bottoms out at canned tomatoes and frozen veggies. I simply don’t buy prepared foods, not for regular meals.
In the second category, yuckiness bottoms out at frozen burritos and canned chili, pretty much, with some candy and chip-like stuff. No Hot Pockets or other highly constructed foodite things.
So I’ve never really encountered frozen meatballs before. Even if they were made from the finest ingredients, I can make meatballs faster than opening a bag. But now I’m training a puppy again, and several sources recommend cheap frozen meatballs as training treats. I thought, “Ew, all gooey and slimy” because I was thinking of my own cooking. OTOH, a lot of packaged dog treats are so owner-oriented that they actually are kind of slimy and oily with Real! Bacon! Flavor! and the like. Ick.
Since I am going to be handling these a bunch for the next few months, I wanted something a little cleaner, so I bought an $8 bag of meata-balz and discovered that after you defrost them, they have the consistency of soft rubber or mostly-hardened clay. They cut into about 16 nice little pyramidal bits each, even more dry and rubbery than most packaged dog treats.
(Puppy loves them.)
So my question is this: do people really eat these horrific, vaguely meat-ish rubber things that make dog treats look tasty? Gaah!
Most people want meatballs covered in lots of sauce or gravy, which covers a multitude of sins, but I’ve had lots of frozen meatballs at other people’s parties and I don’t think I’ve ever minded them. They’re not as good as my home-made meatballs, of course, which I always make in double or triple batches and then freeze so that I have the best of both worlds.
My wife’s dog won’t eat raw chicken hearts. They have to be sauteed. I, on the other hand, don’t mind eating them raw, which I sometimes do when I find one that I dropped on the floor after the others have been cooked. I discover it when I step on it barefoot.
We live near a turkey farm, so I buy a few turkey livers and boil them. Then dice the liver into small pieces and fill small ziplocks. Freeze some, refrigerate some.
I’m not wild about frozen meatballs, but I’ve bought and used them when time was scarce. I think they were Trader Joe’s, and they weren’t bad. But I doused them with lots of tomato basil sauce, so there’s that.
I haven’t had any dogs for years, but they would have gone wild for them. And had garlic breath afterwards.
For an adorable little puppy like that who deserves all the very best treats:
I don’t know, never tried. As long as the seasonings don’t cause unpleasant results why not give it a try? See below for my opinion of them as people food, but dogs have different tastes. He may prefer rubbery texture.
For people:
Tried those. I first got some frozen real meatballs from a grocery that made their own. Not bad really. So I tried some brand. Not worth the trouble. If you brown them in a frying pan, then let them simmer in sauce for a long time, they’ll improve to the point where they resemble a bad meatball. They just always turned out rubbery and added no flavor of their own worth having.
Agreed on the Ikea meatballs, they’re downright acceptable as far as balled meats go. We also used to get Market Day turkey meatballs which were also very tasty. A quick meal with those include a few meatballs, frozen corn, BBQ sauce, and maybe cheese.
I’ve had the Costco meatballs and I didn’t like those as much. I assume a dog would though.
