Kitchen Zink - Spaghetti & Meatballs

Some days I get home and think to myself that there is no way that I feel like cooking.  Waking up at 6:30 in the morning, and then spending the day at my desk trying to figure out how the heck to do my job often leaves me tired out and I just want to flop on the couch, order a pizza and lounge around for the night.  You could call these days Mondays, for lack of a better word.

But some days, even if I’m wiped out, and on rare occasions because I’m wiped out, I very much do want to cook.  Cooking is my fun escape, and after a frustrating day it can be just the solace I’m looking for.  It’s hard to say for sure, but I’m hoping that these days are becoming more frequent as I develop better skills.

So it was a bit of a surprise, but not totally unexpected, when we arrived home after the drive from Dubuque to West Des Moines (3 ½ hours) and I immediately started thinking about what to make for dinner.  Add in that we’d dined out the entire weekend, and that Stacia was busy with catch-up schoolwork, and spending some time meal planning sounded pretty enticing.  On top of that, I had an insatiable craving for spaghetti, but really wanted to step outside the boil pasta, heat Ragu, and serve method.  So where to start?

The obvious solution (to me anyway) was Ellie Krieger and her Turkey Meatballs with Spicy Tomato Sauce and Whole Wheat Spaghetti.  I have had some sort of major food crush on Ellie lately, and in the past few weeks I have made at least three dinners out of her cookbook The Food You Crave.  Ellie’s a nutritionist, and her food philosophy of eating healthy whole natural foods, not depriving yourself, and avoiding bizarre chemical concoctions that reduce fat/calories is something I’m really on board with.  I have her book from the library, but will probably soon buy it since everything we’ve yet made out of it has been fantastic.  The cover, incidentally, shows her spaghetti and meatballs, so perhaps the book itself had been subliminally affecting my thoughts, but sometimes you just feel like spaghetti, darn it!

I ran to the store and grabbed some of the missing ingredients, allowing Stacia to get some work done before the tag-team cooking event began.  First we needed to make the meatballs, which were loaded with tons of tasty vegetables and greens: onion, garlic, carrot, parsley and thyme, to be precise.  It was a lot of chopping, I suppose, but strangely enough I enjoy that aspect of cooking, so it was kinda fun to get all the produce reduced down to size.  Then we mixed in an egg, some bread crumbs, and of course the ground turkey, and the delightfully squishy mass gradually got formed into balls to be baked in the oven.

While they baked, we made the sauce and pasta.  I suppose these were pretty straightforward, but there were some interesting twists.  The main one is that the sauce is a spicy tomato sauce, so we had a key ingredient to give things a little zip: chipotle peppers in adobo sauce.  I’d never heard of these until a year or two ago, but they are awesome little firecrackers.  The chipotles themselves are simply smoke-dried jalapenos, but they are then stewed in a zesty sauce of tomatoes, garlic, vinegar and spices to end up soft and rehydrated.  You can buy little cans of chipotles in adobo sauce in the Mexican section of any grocery store.

Now, chipotles in adobo pack a wallop.  I discovered this the first time I cooked with them, and engaged in my usual (bad) habit of licking the spoon.  Wow!  Very fiery, but if used in the right proportions with other ingredients, they lend a wonderful smoky zip that I don’t think you can replicate any other way.  Thankfully, Ellie only called for one diced pepper with the accompanying sauce, so I knew we weren’t about to be blown away by the spiciness.  Careful not to taste the peppers on their own, I minced one up and tossed it into the sauce.

Like I said, the rest was pretty simple.  Boil water and drop in some whole-wheat spaghetti.  Simmer the sauce together for a while.  When the meatballs had cooked for the allotted oven time, they were transferred into the saucepot to soak up some liquid and cook just a little more.  Miraculously, everything finished at the same time, and we were ready to plate.  Grate on a little bit of leftover Pecorino for a final flair, and it was dinnertime!  (Unfortunately it all looked so good, we just dug in without staging a photo!  But the picture on the web is probably prettier anyway).

As we ate, I decided that this may well be the best spaghetti I’ve ever eaten.  The meatballs were juicy and flavorful, which can be tricky to achieve with turkey.  I have to suspect the transfer from oven to sauce helped a lot with this aspect, so kudos to Ellie for that.  And instead of drab gray turkey, these were flecked with a colorful confetti of carrot and parsley, which made for a more visually appealing meal.

But as good as the meatballs were, I think the sauce even topped them!  Chunky and tomatoey, but with the little pinch of fire from the chipotles, it livened spaghetti up from what can be a very blah presentation.  I will say that it didn’t make a ton of sauce, which ordinarily might bother me (I tend to prefer a lot of sauce) but it really worked on this dish.  Rather than drowning the noodles in sauce, they were accented with it, providing just enough flavor with each bite without overpowering it.  And with the pecorino on top, there was a little added taste even sprinkled on the noodles without any sauce.

It was almost sad the other day when we finished up the leftover spaghetti, since it was simply so good.  It’s so much fun to make something so delicious, knowing at the same time that it’s really good for you.  As the front page of Ellie Krieger’s site says “To get people to eat well don’t say a word about health, just cook fantastic food for them.”  Not to get too full of myself, but I think this turned out being a fantastic meal.  For a day where I was tired out from driving, and really just craved spaghetti, it was a great way for things to turn out.  Easily a repeat recipe.