the pragmatic chef™

A few notes on ingredients and techniques:

Sauce- nothing spectacular here, I used 6 15 oz. cans of diced tomatoes, buzzed up with a stick blender to the consistency I wanted. The nice thing about using whole or diced tomatoes is that you see what you're getting and you have full control over your sauce without having to stock puree, sauce, paste, etc., so it's pantry friendly too. Stick (immersion) blenders are really great for this stuff because they're so easy to clean up. No spicy stuff in the sauce, just lots of garlic, an onion minced finely, thyme and basil. Buzz it all up well with the blender, or you tend to get a lot of "Ooh, yuk, what's that?" and pointing at little bits from kids. Smooth is good. I simmered it for about 2 hours, you don't want to lose the color and brightness of the tomatoes but you do want to bring it all together and reduce some of the acidity.

Meatballs- Again, I didn't want a lot of chunks in it, so I used all dry spices- garlic, onion, parsley, mixed with an egg, olive oil, kosher salt and fresh breadcrumbs. I started with 4 lbs of 80/20 ground beef and made the meatballs fairly small (12 per lb.), because they would be more kid friendly, plus because they weren't going to simmer in the sauce long, the smaller size would help them contribute flavor and absorb the sauce. Remember with sausage, meatballs and meatloaf, always take a bit of the mixture and fry it up so you can taste it before you commit to the final flavor. I actually got lucky this time and liked the first version. No need fry them in a skillet, especially of you're doing 4 dozen, just put them on parchment lined sheet pans and bake them around 375º until done, then pop the broiler on for a few minutes at the end, to brown them up nicely.

Pasta- I used 2 lbs. of rigatoni, freezer friendly and holds lots of sauce. As I said before, cooked to al dente, tossed lightly with oil. Make sure your water is salted properly, boring pasta is boring to kids, too.

Cheese- I wanted melty, gooey stuff so I used 1 lb. of mozzeralla, a hunk of fontina and lots of grated parm.

To assemble, put a layer of sauce in the bottom of each baking dish (15 X 10's in my case, 13 X 9's will work, too) dump 1/2 of the pasta into each one, distribute the meatballs, mozz and fontina chunks in the pasta, top with another layer of sauce, then top with parm. If you think you'll have time to bake them when you pull them out of the freezer, you can build them in individual freezer containers, otherwise bake it now at 325º for about an hour covered with foil for all but the last 15 minutes, then cool and portion accordingly.