Day 1 - January 1, 2014: Meatball Sandwiches with Roasted Broccoli

This is Day 1 of my one-month challenge of cooking dinner for less than $10 every night for our family of four.  Yes, I do realize that with all of the other food blogs out there (crockpot365, 365daysofcrockpot, dinner365, etc.), one month may seem like no challenge to many people.  But since it's only one of several challenges for the new year for me, I figured I'd start on a smaller scale.  Especially since I promised myself to not resort to my favorite quick cheap dinner at all this month: Boxed Mac&Cheese with whatever leftover veggies and meat I have on hand.  That would be cheating, since it would only involve boiling water that day.  However, I will not make every sauce from scratch, or never buy a rotisserie chicken.  I also won't create a lot of recipes from scratch, but I will give proper credit and links, when I use other people's recipes.  This way, who knows, maybe you'll find a link to a food blog you didn't know about before... and everyone wins. 

So, tonight, I am making baked meatball sandwiches with roasted broccoli on the side.  Here is a tally of the different items I purchased for this meal:
1.01 pounds of ground beef: $4.03
6 dinner rolls: $1.99
heavy whipping cream: $1.99 for 473ml, of which I used 150ml, so that's ~$.65?
ball of mozzarella cheese: $2.69 (I don't know how much the TJ brand actually is; I usually get the Aldi's brand for $2.69, so I'm going with that)
broccoli crowns: $1.60
packaged Knorr tomato soup mix: free to me, since my Mom brought it from Europe, but it usually costs about 65 cents there...
plus: salt+pepper+evoo
So, I spent $10.96 on dinner tonight.  Definitely over the challenge goal, but not by much.  Maybe this challenge will be harder than I thought.  I should have done the math before I desperately tried to use up all of the mozzarella - that much cheese was not needed and I admit that I did eat 2 pieces instead of putting them into the dish, so technically, technically.... ;o)  Oh well, we have pasta with tuna, tomatoes, and garbanzo beans on the menu for tomorrow - hopefully, I didn't grossly miscalculate that one, too! 

Btw, this recipe is adapted from a Knorr Fix recipe, I am pretty sure the original is called "Hackbällchen Toscana". 

And this is the recipe:
Season meat with some salt and pepper, form little meatballs and put them into a pyrex dish.  Mix tomato soup packet with 1 1/4 cup of liquid - I used 2/3 cup heavy cream and filled up the rest with water.  Pour over meatballs and top with sliced mozzarella.  Bake covered for ca. 25 minutes, remove cover and bake for 20 minutes more at 400 degrees F.  During those last 20 minutes, put the broccoli, tossed with olive oil and s+p, into the oven to roast.  Throw your rolls into the oven for the last couple of minutes to warm them up.  I used take&bake rolls, so mine took about 7 minutes.

And here is the final (a little over $10) product:

The kids didn't want meatball sandwiches, so they had their meatballs on the side:

Everyone had seconds and there was plenty for my husband to take to work tomorrow; I threw in rice from the night before, since the roll that was left doesn't reheat as well.