Outdoor Cooking: Rice and Meatballs

Outdoor cooking doesn’t have to use a solar oven, grill, or campfire. If you can put your slow cooker or crock-pot on your porch or balcony, you can cook outside and keep some heat out of the house! That’s what I did the other day, when I cooked rice and meatballs in my slow cooker.

The recipe was simple and required few ingredients.

Tomato water is what I call the water I save from defrosting frozen tomatoes for canning. Because I’m cooking them down to make pizza sauce, I drain the tomatoes to save cooking time. My frugal genes won’t let me throw that tomato water away, so I save it for making rice, gravy, or soup.

After the rice was started, I heated up some frozen meatballs to add.

Rice and meatballs don’t have the same slow-cooker cooking time, so the meatballs needed to be cooked before adding. After that, I could just forget about it until it was time to eat.

I served it with a salad of cucumbers and tomatoes from the garden and my ricotta ranch salad dressing. We had homegrown watermelon for dessert. It’s nice to have a simple meal after a busy day.