Cocktail or Party Meatballs

Yum! Party meatballs! You know the ones. The kind you find at...parties. Usually in a crockpot.
I first heard of the recipe from my neighbor. Her mother in law made them. Ingredients: frozen meatballs, jar of grape jelly and a bottle of chili sauce. Well, those are definitely NOT on our list of safe foods!
We are corn, dairy, wheat, peanut, soy, egg, various tree nut, millet, sorghum, oat, chicken, turkey and a few odds and ends free.
This made the dairy, soy, corn and wheat laden meatballs off limits. As is the corny grape jelly and the corny soy chili sauce. Arrrgh!
I really wanted to make them for Weston's 3rd birthday pirate party!
I've subbed every other food, so why not these meatballs?
I looked up a few traditional recipes. Grape jelly or jellied cranberry sauce are the preferred fruity/sweet taste. Most jellies are out and cranberries are hard to come by in April! Heinz chili sauce or close variants of it are the spicy/meaty end of the flavor. And meatballs are easy.

Step 1- Make meatballs
1 pound ground beef
1 pound ground pork
3 TBS onion flakes
1TBS garlic powder
1 TBS sea salt

Step 2- Chili sauce
I thought this would be the hard part, but it was actually quite simple!
1 cup tomato sauce (I used 2 TBS tomato paste because it is citric acid free plus enough water to equal a cup)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 tsp allspice
2 TBS apple cider vinegar

I also added some diced jalapeño and Serrano chile. I had about a tablespoon total. Next time I will add more. It added great flavor!











Step 3- Raspberry jello
This was good, but next time I will use more raspberries or cranberry sauce

1/2 bag Cascadian Farms organic red raspberries (these are corn free)

I put the raspberries in my Vitamix with 2 tsp sugar. Then added water up to 2 cup line.


I then blended till smooth and ran through strainer. I used this to make jello.

Boil 1 1/2 cups strained raspberries. While this is coming to boil, put additional 1/2 cup liquid in a bowl and pour one packet gelatin over it.
When liquid comes to boil, pour in bowl with gelatin mixture. Cover and refrigerate till set.

Make the meatballs! I had a little over 100.
Bake at 375 for 20 minutes or until brown and cooked through.

Put in crockpot

Mix chili sauce and jello and pour over meatballs.

I put it all together the next day (meatballs weren't hot). They were in crockpot for 5 hours on high and they were perfect!
So good that the final photo I got was of them all gone!