LogFAQs > #961810044

If it's a matter of improvising a dinner with pasta and sauce that are already on hand and wanting to make that more interesting with some meat, probably chicken, specifically frozen breaded chicken strips. Even if I've already got ground meat available, it'll be in the freezer unless I planned to use it that night, and making meatballs is a non-trivial amount of extra work. By comparison, I almost always have some frozen chicken strips available (my girlfriend's go-to lunch is a salad topped with a diced one), so it's a simple matter of throwing some in the oven for half an hour and dicing them up to put on the pasta for a discount chicken parmagiana sort of experience.

If it's a matter of specifically planning a few nights of pasta dinners and preparing the sauce and meat for that, generally meatballs or a ground meat sauce over anything using chicken breasts/thighs. That said, saying this, I'm kind of craving exactly that (specifically, chicken cooked by simmering it in marinara sauce, served with pasta) and that may end up being one of my dinners in the coming weeks, so that's far from being an absolute preference.

Jen0125 posted...

If I'm doing ground beef I'm making a meat sauce not meatballs. I prefer a thick meaty sauce if I'm gonna have beef in there.

I find they serve different purposes. As much as both ultimately boil down to just "beef in pasta sauce," meatballs offer such a different texture and flavour distribution that I don't feel I can really compare them directly. Sometimes I'm in the mood for one, sometimes the other.

Though a bolognese sauce is like a million times quicker and easier to make than doing meatballs, especially where I tend to sautee a bunch of veggies to mix in with my sauce regardless of what I do with the meat and I therefore already have the pan out and hot. That's a big plus.