Remember those yummy Freezer Meal Meatballs I posted awhile back? Well here is a delicious recipe to use them in. Since you already have the meatballs in your freezer {you do, right?}, it’s a super simple dinner idea. This was a hit with my whole crew {even the picky ones}.
Freezer Meal – Sweet and Sour Meatballs
Ingredients
1 can pineapple chunks {20 oz}
1/3 cup water
3 tablespoons white vinegar
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
30 Freezer Meal Meatballs
1 large green pepper, cut into 1-inch chunks
Cooked rice
Instructions
Drain pineapple, save juice and set pineapple aside. Measure 1 cup of pineapple juice {add water to reach a cup if the can doesn’t yield enough} and pour into a large skillet. Add 1/3 cup water, vinegar, soy sauce, brown sugar and cornstarch. Stir until smooth. Cook over medium heat until sauce begins to thicken. Add the pineapple, meatballs and green pepper. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes or until meatballs are hot. Serve with rice.
You can also make this meal as a freezer meal when preparing the meatballs. After the meatballs have cooked, follow the recipe above. Instead of serving hot over rice, let cool and then freeze in a Ziploc or other freezer safe container. To prepare after freezing, simply warm the mixture over the stove until hot. Then serve freezer meal over rice.
Deborah says
Looks yummy! You never cease to amaze me! 🙂
But Mavis, i couldn’t help noticing you didn’t put a date on your freezer bags.
How do you keep track of when they were made??
Cheryl says
Looks Yummy! I’m thinking if you are doing the freezing that you wouldn’t simmer for 20 min since that’s to get it hot. Am I correct or does it need that cooking time too?
Mavis Butterfield says
Nope, you are right. 🙂
Julianna says
This recipe is very good with chunks of chicken or turkey too! Yum!
Jessica says
what type of vinegar do you use?
Mavis says
I just used white vinegar but you could probably fiddle with it and sub it out if you had a different kind.
Holly says
How do you make it out right? Do you defrost the frozen meat balls
Jules says
Great recipe. As an Australian all measurements were tweaked a little bit, a 440g can of pineapple, less sugar, the meatballs were made with 1kg of meat but only about 2/3 were used for this recipe and we used an onion.
Bec says
I was looking for a really nice sweet and sour sauce (after trying one or two not so good ones). This sauce was so yummy! I used a red pepper and added a red onion. I’ve already made it twice 🙂
Jessica says
This was really good. I used a red bell pepper and added half of a white onion as well. I used rice wine vinegar in place of white vinegar and low-sodium soy sauce. I’ll probably back off the sugar a little bit next time. This was a super quick and easy meal using microwave jasmine rice and some frozen egg rolls that I heated in a toaster oven.
I didn’t make any for the freezer this time, but I’m going to experiment and see if I can get away with not using the stovetop at all. I will try just mixing the sauce ingredients without heating and portioning it equally into freezer containers that I can pop in my steam oven to cook. I’m not sure if the sauce will thicken properly that way, but I’ll give it a try.
I think I prefer meatballs for sweet and sour now versus chicken or pork. But I think this would work equally well with some frozen chicken bites. I almost bought some gluten-free fried chicken bites to try this out, but decided to try the recipe as is first and it’s perfect. My mom doesn’t like anything spicy and she enjoyed this even if the pineapple threw her a little bit at first. Ha. I would add some red pepper flakes to my leftovers since I like some heat. I have a bottle of store-bought sweet and sour sauce in my fridge, but this sauce was so easy to make and very tasty that I’ll never buy sweet and sour again.