Chicken Parmesan Meatball Subs

If you’re looking for something new and exciting to eat for dinner, you have to try these Chicken Parmesan Meatball Subs with a quick homemade tomato sauce. Packed with plenty of flavor and topped with lots of melted cheese.

I’ve been in a menu planning slump lately. Each week, I struggle to figure out what I want to eat for the week and end up resorting to the same meals over and over, which usually involves too much pasta. I’m not very good at buying groceries on a whim and hoping that I can come up with something; I’m a planner who needs to make a list. I also tend to buy the same proteins over and over: bone-in chicken breasts, chicken quarters, shrimp, ground beef. Sometimes when I don’t know what I want to make, I’ll pick a protein for inspiration and roll with it. I haven’t had ground chicken in a long time, so I thought about what I could make. Meatballs immediately came to mind. Rather than making spaghetti and meatballs, I opted for Chicken Parmesan Meatball Subs, the cousin to traditional beef meatball subs with a quick homemade tomato sauce and of course topped with lots of cheese. No need to pound out or bread chicken breast – just mix everything together and go. This recipe can easily be made in an hour, especially if you cook the sauce while the meatballs are baking. You can even make the sauce ahead of time. The meatballs make great leftovers too as I usually have a sub or two for lunch or dinner again the next day. Take that, menu planning slump.

Meatballs need a ton of flavor as they can get pretty bland pretty quickly, so I made sure to use plenty of onion, garlic, Parmesan cheese, basil, and parsley. When it comes to cooking with herbs, I have a bad habit of buying fresh herbs then throwing them out because they wilted too quickly. A few summers ago, I was introduced to the company Gourmet Garden as they were demonstrating their products at an event I attended. They make stir in pastes and lightly dried herbs that taste like you are cooking with fresh herbs but last much longer, which you can find in the produce section. They also make garlic and ginger pastes, which I use the most because you don’t have to peel or chop anything (their next product should be onion paste. That would be amazing). I was impressed with their lightly dried herbs because you can tell they are dried just enough to still feel fresh, unlike the completely dried herbs you find in most spice aisles.

I prefer to bake my meatballs rather than frying, not only because it’s healthier but mainly because the cooking process becomes hands off. You can use that 25-30 minutes to make the sauce or work on some side dishes. Even though the meatballs may not be perfectly round, I find that baking them on a rack inside a baking pan helps keep them as round as possible while also letting the fat drip down into the pan. Besides, the slightly flat sides helps keep them from rolling off of the buns, right?

 
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