Glazed Apricot Bourbon Meatballs – Elegant Slow-Cooker Appetizer

 

One of the quiet joys of living alone is the freedom to turn appetizers into dinner without a single raised eyebrow. Some evenings, that’s exactly what hits the spot—no fuss, just pure indulgence.

While flipping through my collection of vintage family cookbooks from the 1960s and 1970s, I rediscovered a treasure trove of meatball recipes. Meatballs have always held a special place in my heart. At my parents’ cocktail parties, there was inevitably a chafing dish (or two) brimming with them—savory, saucy, irresistible. As a little girl, I'd sneak a toothpick, slip into a corner, and spear a couple when no one was watching. That mischievous child still lives inside me, and she approves wholeheartedly of this grown-up version.

I combined elements from a few of those classic recipes to create something truly special: tender meatballs bathed in a glossy, balanced sauce that marries the sweet fruitiness of apricot with the warm depth of bourbon, a touch of smoky barbecue, and subtle savory notes. The result is elegant yet comforting—perfect as a sophisticated appetizer, piled high on a hoagie roll for a hearty sandwich, or served over rice or pasta for a satisfying dinner.

Resist the urge to double the sauce. These meatballs are meant to be beautifully glazed, not swimming. The concentrated coating clings perfectly, delivering flavor in every bite. And, if you can, resist the urge to use frozen meatballs and use your own. Frozen meatballs always strike me as beefy flavored Superballs.

Here’s the recipe I’ve been enjoying lately:

Glazed Apricot Bourbon Meatballs

1 lb. homemade or store-bought frozen meatballs
½ c. apricot preserves
¼ c. bourbon
½ c. barbecue sauce (I prefer Jack Stack or Stubb's)
1 T. Worcestershire sauce
½ T. Country Dijon mustard
½ T. garlic powder
½ T. onion powder
Pinch of red pepper flakes (optional)

Place the meatballs in a 3-quart slow cooker. 

In a medium bowl, whisk together the apricot preserves, bourbon, barbecue sauce, Worcestershire sauce, Dijon mustard, garlic powder, onion powder, and red pepper flakes (if using) until smooth. 

Pour the sauce over the meatballs and gently stir to coat them evenly. 

Cover and cook on LOW for 3–4 hours or HIGH for about 2½ hours, until the meatballs are heated through and the sauce has thickened into a glossy glaze. (If using thawed or homemade meatballs instead of frozen, check earlier—around 2–3 hours on LOW—to avoid overcooking.) 

Give a gentle stir, then serve warm. Garnish with a sprinkle of fresh herbs or a crack of black pepper if desired. 

This recipe can be doubled. In which case, use a 4-quart slow cooker.

These disappear quickly whether you're hosting a gathering or treating yourself to a cozy solo supper. The bourbon adds a subtle sophistication, the apricot brings a bright sweetness, and the barbecue sauce ties it all together with just the right smoky edge.

If you try them, let me know how they turn out—or what vintage recipe you’ve revived lately. I’d love to hear!

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German Chocolate Pound Cake

I am a plain cake kind of girl. I like a cake that is simple, not overly sweet, and, well, frankly, portable, because I love to enjoy it while curled up on the couch with a cup of hot spiced tea and a favorite book. I realize that I may be singular in my plain cake love, but you may change your mind once you taste this vintage recipe (another from my mother's recipe box).

My mom used to make this when I was a kid. She served it either with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a drizzle of hot fudge sauce (you might try this one), or marshmallow sauce (Melissa's makes wonderful dessert sauces if you don't care to make your own). I must confess to having a bit of a weakness for the latter, which is really nothing more than a jar of marshmallow fluff, thinned to the desired consistency with simple syrup. Either way it is an excellent way to satisfy an afternoon craving. 

German Chocolate Pound Cake

2 cups sugar
1 cup shortening
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 teaspoons butter flavoring
1 cup buttermilk
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 4-ounce package German Sweet Chocolate

Preheat oven to 300°F. Grease and flour a 9" tube pan; set aside.

Cream sugar and shortening. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition. Add flavorings and buttermilk. Sift together the flour, soda, and salt, and add to the creamed ingredients, beating just until blended. Soften German Chocolate in the microwave (about a minute should do it), and add to the mixture.

Pour mixture into prepared pan, spreading evenly. Bake for 1 hour and 20 minutes or until cake tests done with a toothpick that has been inserted 2" from the stem of the pan. Remove from oven when done, turn out onto a plate, and cover with a tight fitting cake cover while the cake is still hot and leave covered until it has completely cooled.

This cake improves with age, so I don't serve it until day two. It lasts five days, covered, on the counter.

This post is linked to:

Wow Us Wednesday
Work It Wednesday

What’s It Wednesday

What We Accomplished Wednesday

Full Plate Thursday

The Weekend Social

Foodie Friday

Magic Bars

I am petitioning in favor of the “Post-Christmas Cookie.”  You know, the one that you wanted to try, or that you really, REALLY, love to bake, but never had a chance to make during the season because you were just so darned busy/stressed/frazzled/overscheduled (please select one, or more, what the heck?).  Yes, if not for very generous bakers and their skilled offspring bringing me cookies, I wouldn’t have had a one.  So, after the day was over, I decided to bake a favorite recipe for bar cookies that dates back to my Home Ec days in high school.  They go by many names, Magic Bars, Hello Dollies, and a host of others, but whatever the name, no one is unfamiliar with this rich and chewy bar cookie.  I make mine a bit different from the original recipe in that I use both semi-sweet and milk chocolate chips.  I also like to make a richer nut mixture by using a mixed nut mix of pecans, cashews, macadamias, almonds, filberts, and Brazil nuts.

Why not join me in my post-holiday baking and give these chewy crowd pleasers a try?

Magic Bars

1 stick butter

1-1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs

(from about a pack and a half of graham crackers)

1 14-oz. can sweetened condensed milk

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

1 cup milk chocolate chips

1 cup flaked coconut

1 cup chopped mixed nuts

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Now you have two options: spray a 9” x 13” pan with non-stick cooking spray, OR (as I did) line it with foil so that about 1-1/2” of foil hangs over the short edges, and then spray the foil with the non-stick cooking spray.  This will allow you to lift the entire thing out of the pan, slide off the foil (which is why it MUST be sprayed as well) and then make perfect little square cuts.

Combine graham cracker crumbs and butter.  If you buy graham cracker crumbs, just empty the correct amount into a medium bowl, drizzle with the butter, and stir until completely coated.  If using a food processor, break up a pack and a half of whole graham crackers, pulse until they become crumbs, and then pour the melted butter through the feed tube during the last stages of pulsing, and, Bob’s your uncle! 

Press crumbs and butter mixture into the bottom of your prepared pan.  Pour sweetened condensed milk evenly over the crumb mixture.  Layer evenly with chocolate chips, coconut, and nuts.  Press down firmly with your hands (Sometimes it helps to lightly dampen your hands to keep the ingredients from sticking.).

Bake for 20-25 minutes until just browned.  Cool.  Firmly grasping foil overhang, carefully lift from pan and place on cutting board.  Peel foil away from the edges and slide it out from under the baked bars.  Cut in even squares.

This post is linked to:

Metamorphosis Monday  
Amaze Me Monday

From Grandmother's Cookbook: CHICKEN a la KING

A while ago I posted about the wonderful time I had paging through my grandmother's cookbook in the entry found here.  I've been at it again, browsing and cooking, and am going to share with you not only the photo of the delicious result, but the very pages written by my grandmother's hand that charmed me to the core.

Basically, this is the recipe that I used, and have been using for years, but to suit our tastes, I now add 1 clove of finely minced garlic and 1/2 cup of chopped onion in with the mushrooms and green pepper.  These ingredients just seem to add a depth to the flavor that we rather like, but then, what can't be improved with the addition of onion and garlic?  Despite adding the chopped onion, however, I do still add the onion juice, so don't eliminate that no matter what you do.  In addition, sometimes, just sometimes, I am a little heavy handed with the Sherry!


This is an elegant dish, made popular in the seventies, and still earns praises today.


Bon Appetit!

Creamy Ham Towers

I began to call this a "vintage" dish, but then thought that perhaps that made it sound as if it had been around for a while, gathering dust, like me.  No, actually this recipe comes from a vintage cookbook.  I'm told that vintage is anything that dates back to the seventies, which, I suppose, would make me a Classic {sigh}.  That thought alone pretty much makes me want to throw myself on the floor, but I digress...

Back in the day, young women used to have something called a Hope Chest (a term, according to Wikipedia, used primarily by Midwestern and Southern U.S. women).  It wasn't literally a chest (although it could be), but more a collection of household items gathered by women in the anticipation of marriage.  In High School my girlfriends and I had a ball collecting such things for our "Hope Chests" which really amounted to plastic storage boxes that we kept under our beds.  Any time we'd spot a special deal, we'd alert the other and as a consequence, pretty much ended up with boxes of the same things. We embroidered tea towels that I doubt any of us, to this day, have ever used, collected dishware, pots and pans, and cookbooks.  The '70s were a decade of lots of rewards for shopping, banking, buying gas, etc.  Upon opening up my first savings account, I got a two-slot toaster for free (into the Hope Chest).  For buying gas (at 35¢ a gallon) I managed to collect an entire set of NFL glassware (ditto), and each week I'd go to the grocery store, buy $5.00 worth of items to make myself eligible to purchase one in a series of Better Homes and Gardens Cookbooks for $1.99.  The toaster, glassware, and dishes are long gone, but I still have the cookbooks and use them to this day.  The recipes are simple, generally call for on-hand ingredients, and while not gourmet fare, are great comfort food.

Feeling nostalgic yesterday (read: old and tired) I pulled out the cookbooks and ended up making a favorite dish called Creamy Ham Towers.  A friend joined us for dinner (and the Mizzou basketball game) and loved the meal, that also included broccoli, a side salad, and rice pudding for dessert. It made me smile to get such high praise for something so simple, but then any time you want high praise for cooking, invite a single man to dinner.

This recipe comes from the book called Make Ahead Meals, the page of which I'm sharing below.  Look to the right and you'll see a recipe for Oriental Beef Casserole, another make-ahead family favorite.  If the spatters are any indication, this book is well-used. I've not yet tried the Ham-Vegetable Strata.

Photo by Robert Redenbaugh

This is linked to Foodie Friday.


Modern women may want to add this gem to their cookbook collection.

"Willie's Orange Bread," a Vintage Cookbook Discovery

This past October my Aunt, my cousin, my mother and I all gathered at my parents house for a little gathering that I dubbed "Old Family Recipe Night."  More aptly, I suppose, it should have been "Family Old Recipe Night," but with the aging family members, myself among them, I suppose it was apt either way.  It was a night when we each brought a dish to share for dinner, along with recipes, or cookbooks that had belonged to my grandmother (who passed away at the age of 83 in May of 1984).  

I thought I was the sole recipient of her cookbook, a blue canvas three-ring binder that must have, at one time, belonged to some contractor who once paid her a visit as it had some sort of file number written boldly across the front in Magic Marker (remember those?).  It was full of recipes written by her own hand, some that I had written in a rather forced, childish scrawl when I was about 10 (something I remember doing to this day), and many, many recipes cut from magazines, newspapers, and the back of boxes taped  to notebook paper now crumbling and yellowed with age.  As an adult,  I now realize that she had me copying these recipes as a way to keep me busy when she was babysitting -- clever woman!  My  Aunt contributed two more of grandma's books, from her later years, with some recipes typed, many handwritten, and lots more pastings.

It was quite a moving experience for all of us, and we learned a lot about grandma that night despite the fact that, unlike me, she wrote no commentary on any of her recipes.  Still, paging through her old books we had to laugh as we found not one vegetable recipe, and few meat or chicken recipes.  Largely what we found were desserts, coffeecakes, cakes, pies (Strawberry Glazed Pie must have been a favorite as it was found any number of times in a variety of her cookbooks), breads, and cookies.  Yes, grandma was the carb queen!  How funny that something like a cookbook can be so very revealing.

One recipe that I was delighted to find was for an orange quick bread from the 70's .  It was a morning bread that I always remember liking and it had been given to my mother by her friend Willie (for Willisdean) Schebelen about five years before she passed away.  I got such a taste for it about a year ago that I asked my mother if she could please search her files for it as I didn't have it in mine and intensive "googling" revealed nothing even close to what I'd remembered.  My mother, not a fan of quick breads, told me that she had thrown her recipe away long ago, so I figured it was lost forever.  But paging through grandma's cookbooks there it was.  Simply called "Orange Bread" and not the "Willie's Orange Bread" that I had dubbed it so many years ago, it had been attributed to both my mother (Jackie) and aunt (Carol), but it was Willie's all the same.

I could hardly wait to get home and bake it.  What a rush of memories came flooding back with that first bite!  Suddenly it was the seventies all over again.  I could hear the high school band playing, the cheerleaders cheering on the team, the sound of my friends splashing as they jumped into the lake, and taste the greasy goodness of the burgers from the local Drive-in.

I don't suppose the baking or tasting of this loaf will evoke any such memories for you, but I think it's something you may enjoy anyway, and while you're eating it, think back to your high school days with fondness.

Willie's Orange Bread

1 cup orange juice (I used freshly squeezed)

1 cup raisins

1/2 cup nuts (I used pecans)

1 beaten egg

2 tsp. vanilla

1/4 tsp. salt

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1 cup sugar

2 tablespoons butter

1 tsp. grated orange rind (I used 1 T.)

Cream butter and sugar; add beaten egg.  Whisk together dry ingredients, mixing well. Combine wet and dry mixtures. Pour into greased loaf pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes or until tests done.