Buffalo Chicken Meatballs

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Happy Groundhog Day everyone and let's all rejoice in the fact that spring is soon on its way!  Yay!!! Enough about Bill Murray and onto this meal!  :)

Oh...ma...gawd...this meal was soooooo good!  So I've been stalking Pinterest fairly frequently again and found this absolutely amazing recipe for Buffalo Chicken Meatballs.  Buffalo chicken ANYTHING is a must in this household, and I've even recently printed out a whole stack of 'to do' buffalo chicken recipes, so be prepared for more!

I've also decided that I want to start doing more variety on this site, so be prepared for more than just low calorie dinners!  Whoop whoop!

So, first thing's first: I preheat my oven to 350 degrees and lined a cookie sheet with foil, spraying it with cooking spray.  Once those were prepped, I set that aside and took some carrots (the recipe called for 1 carrot but I only had baby carrots so I used 6), 1 stalk of celery and green onions, chopping them into large chunks and putting them into my food processor, letting it chop it to a slaw consistency.

I then added that mixture to 1 pound of ground chicken, 1 egg, 1/2 cup of panko breadcrumbs (yum!), 1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of blue cheese and 1/4 cup of Frank's Red Hot Sauce.  You can certainly use whichever buffalo sauce you prefer but, really, what other kind is there??  :)

I combine all of that together and formed the mixture into 28 small meatballs (I know right??) and put them on the prepared cookie sheet.  Once those were formed, I put the cookie sheet in the oven for 20 minutes.  As there were about 2 minutes left to cook, I put 1 tablespoon of butter and another 1/4 cup of Frank's Red Hot Sauce into a bowl and microwaved it for about 45 seconds, to ensure the butter was melted and the sauce was warm enough.

The calories were so low for this (157 calories for 4 meatballs), that I split the meatballs equally and served them over pasta with the additional butter/hot sauce mixture over it, like a pasta!  It was soooooooooo yummy!  So WITH the pasta and extra meatballs, it was still only 470 calories, which stayed under my 500 calories!  Woo!!  Also, including the pasta, this meal was only $2.02/serving!!!  Yay!  Voila!!!  Dinner was served with minimal work, calories and money!

Here's the recipe!

1 pound lean ground chicken

1 egg

1/2 cup panko breadcrumbs

1 carrot

1 stalk celery

2 green onions

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons blue cheese

1/2 cup Frank's Red Hot Sauce, divided

1 tablespoon butter

Happy cooking everyone!!