Italian Meatball Sliders

Now that I have this meatball recipe under my belt, I will certainly add meatballs to basically every dish I ever make. Even if it doesn't really make sense.

Because they were so simple, and this method of cooking them is way easier than anything I've ever tried before. And so yummy! For such little bites, they were packed with tons of flavor.

I adapted a recipe from a fairly recent issue of Cooking Light--but, I will admit, I didn't use every light ingredient that they called for.

Italian Meatball Sliders
adapted from Cooking Light

Ingredients:
*1/3 cup Panko bread crumbs (one of my favorite discoveries since I started cooking!)
*1 1/2 tablespoons minced basil (though the recipe calls for fresh, I only had dried)
*1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
*approximately 12 ounces of ground beef
*1 large egg
*2 garlic cloves, minced
*a dash of garlic powder
*a dash of onion powder
*12 slider buns or small hamburger buns
*cooking spray
*12 slices of mozzarella cheese
*1 cup marinara sauce

Directions:
Preheat the broiler to high. (This was my first time ever broiling something, and I will definitely use it more often! Even our temperamental oven cooked these meatballs flawlessly!)

Combine the bread crumbs, the basil/garlic/powders, the salt, the ground beef, and the egg in a large mixing bowl. Mix it well so that the ingredients get evenly distributed throughout the beef. I wanted to make sure to avoid one ball combined solely of garlic and bread crumbs, so I spent a little extra time on this. It paid off!

Form the mixture into 24 delightful little meatballs, and place them on a broiler pan that's been sprayed with cooking spray. The original recipe called for splitting the beef into 24 equal parts first to make sure that it gets divided evenly, but I thought that sounded pretty redundant, and I did a pretty good job just by eyeballing it.

Slide them in the oven and broil them for about three minutes or so. When time's up, take them out and turn them over. Stick them back in for about two minutes or until they're as done as you want 'em to be.

Put two little meatballs on each set of the bun bottoms. Put a cheese slice on top, and broil for about one minute, or until the cheese is melted.

(I really diverged from the recipe here, because I wanted to get the tops on too, so I broiled them as complete sandwiches, missing only the marinara sauce, which I ended up putting on top of the sandwich. It wasn't as messy as I expected it to be, and I loved having the cheese really melt into the bun and the meatballs. )

Then, take them out, and top with the bun top and the marinara sauce--either in the regular order or in my crazy order of things! Either way, it's delicious!!