On top of Spaghetti – simple tomato sauce and turkey meatballs.

 

I promised my tomato sauce recipe a few weeks back.  It wasn’t until I was pulling a container full out of the freezer tonight for a quick, Sunday night, I-haven’t-done-the-laundry-yet dinner, that I remembered.   My folks were in town this weekend, so we loaded up the weekend with activities and eating out, as opposed to routine grocery-story-and-yard-work weekends that we are generally accustomed to, so we decided on a quick and easy dinner of Spaghetti and Meatballs. 

In addition to the sauce that I had stowed away in the freezer, this meal was inspired by the pound of ground turkey that I had forgotten about in the meat drawer (out of sight out of mind — luckily only a day or two of forgetting here), and a pound of pasta that Susie sent us for Christmas.  They all came together tonight in this delicious dish.  Here’s what I did:

My Easy Tomato Sauce

If you remember from the tomato salad a few post back, I picked 67 tomatoes from our garden a few weekends ago.  A few made it into a tomato salad for lunch that day, but the majority of them made their way into a simple tomato sauce.  For the sauce, I started a pot of boiling water, and submerged the tomatoes for a few seconds to loosen their skins.  After their dunk, I pealed the skin from the tomatoes, and threw them through the food mill to collect all the pulpy goodness.  I milled about 60 tomatoes in all, and ended up with about 12 cups of tomato goo. 

I chopped 5 carrots into small half moons, a yellow onion into dime sized pieces, and a jalapeño (seeds and ribs removed) and 5 cloves of garlic into a nice mince. 

I started the carrots and onions in the 7 1/4 qt Creuset with about 3 T olive oil heated until it glistened.  Once the aromatics had nicely browned, I added the minced veggies, and a few crushed red pepper flakes and gave them all a stir, letting them cook until the garlic started to stink (in a good way, of course). 

Once I could smell the garlic (I mean really smell the garlic), I added about a cup of a sensible red wine – nothing too good, nothing too bad.  With some help from the alcohol bubbling away, I made sure to scrape away any brownness from the bottom of the pan.   The veggie-wine concoction would soon become as think as paste -– it was time to add he tomatoes, which I did carefully, so as not to spitter and spatter.  For a little flavor, I added in a few cubes of pesto. and a few sprigs of fresh thyme.

I let the to-be-sauce come to a boil, then reduced the fire to low, and let it cook and cook and cook, about 4 hours total.  Once the sauce had darkened and reduced, I added my secret ingredient – 3T sugar.  You would never know it was in there, but it balances the acidity of the tomatoes perfectly.  After the saice had cooled, I ladled the sauce into freezer storage containers and sent them into the deep freeze.

Turkey Meatballs

For the meatballs, I started by making up a batch of bread crumbs (simply because we didn’t have any in the cupboard).  I took two pieces of wheat bread, pulsed them in the food processor for a few seconds with 1T Penzeys Pizza Seasoning, poured them out over a baking sheet, sprayed a thin layer of olive oil over them, and sent them into a 375°F oven for 10 mins. 

Once the breadcrumbs had cooled, I mixed them together with 1 pound ground turkey, 1/4 c parmesan cheese, 1 egg, salt and pepper.  I rolled golf ball sized meatballs and placed them onto a lightly oiled baking sheet, stuck them into a 375°F oven for 12 mins, rotating once along the way.

You can probably figure out the rest…  heat the sauce, boil the pasta, plop the meatballs on the top, and sprinkle it all with cheese.

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~ by cmcameron on September 13, 2009.