Spaghetti and Meatballs

My dad is 1/2 Italian. His grandma was a fresh-off-the boat immigrant from the 1920's (if I recall) to America. So he grew up in a home where Italian food was a staple, especially any foods with red sauce, or gravy, as he calls it. You know what gravy is in the south? It's the grey-brown stuff that goes on mashed potatoes, rice, or biscuits, made with a roux and broth. I digress. He doesn't have an exact recipe for his "gravy" per se, but he does have strict guidelines. No onions or other stray vegetables in your spaghetti sauce, for instance. That's a Sicilian thing and we aren't Sicilian. I don't tell him that I like to sneak onions and mushrooms in mine that I make at home. I also tend to sneak a pinch of sugar in to my sauce. That does not happen with his!

Meatballs are huge and include a lot of breadcrumbs. If you think breadcrumbs as in the stuff you find in those tall canisters at the grocery store, you are sadly mistaken. I'm talking white bread ripped to shreds. It grosses me out, I'm not going to lie. I love meatballs but I despise biting in to one and finding a huge chunk of soggy bread.....gaaahhhhh I can't continue. Moving on. Point being: if I recall, his meatballs are bread, meat, garlic, and other spices. And by garlic I mean cloves *and* powder.

Needless to say, I will not be telling him how I tarnished our family's reputation by not only making a sauce that has carrot puree in it, but meatballs with a squash puree. Sacrilege! And we definitely will not be mentioning the fact that these meatballs aren't even made with hamburger meat but ground turkey. Actually in my case it's ground chicken because the chicken was on sale.  This should be interesting. I might be in way over my head. For the record, Olivia saw the picture in the book and asked for this meal. As another note, spaghetti sauce you find bottled on the shelves often contains milk in the ingredients. This means that it's necessary to utilize a good sauce recipe when we can!

First up, make some coffee because you've been up since 7:30 after not falling asleep until 2am. Some people are having a rough day today because they have hangovers from partying too hard. I have a killer headache because fireworks keep little kids up super late at night and then I was coughing my lungs out. 7:30 this morning the kids woke up and my head was on fire. Oh and my voice is gone! Fun times. Coffee to loosen up that congestion and give a little pick me up? Yes, please. 2 sugars and a nice dollop of almond milk creamer.

I refuse to let go of the Christmas mugs until after January 6th. Don't be jealous. 

Next, I make the pureed vegetables. In all likelihood, I probably have enough carrots leftover from the other night for the 1/4 cup of pureed carrots in this recipe. But because vegetables come to my crisper to die a rotten death, I need to get those things pureed and in my freezer anyway. Chop chop! Haha, get it? Chop?? Get it?? Shut up. I went to the healthier, more expensive Harris Teeter to get my butternut squash yesterday and what do you know? They only had it in pre-cut chunks. I had to pay more for it than a whole squash that I would have to cut myself, but it does save me time. FYI: between the two, I am cheap before I am lazy....most of the time. I grate my Fels Naptha bar instead of buying the pre-grated stuff for laundry detergent. But with all the puree prepping the past few days, it's kind of nice to have at least one vegetable half-way ready for me already. Time to microwave steam and then puree those chunks! I'm also working on sweet potatoes at the same time because tomorrow morning will involve sweet potato pancakes and REAL bacon. Hey, we can't be perfect from the start. The recipe calls for a can of whole peeled tomatoes. Note on this one: do not pour the entire can in to the large nutribullet container and expect it to work. The thing spit tomato juice at me! Thankfully I was wearing a black shirt, but it could have been catastrophic for my very limited wardrobe otherwise.

Why do I use the Nutribullet? Easy cleanup, really, first of all. Secondly, I have infuriatingly tiny kitchen counters. This picture is of the carrots.

The vegetables are pureed so it's time for the next step: combine the ingredients to make the pseudo-meatballs. 1 lb turkey (or chicken) ground, 1 cup of breadcrumbs (again panko), salt, pepper, a clove of garlic, and the squash puree. It looks weird but it's too late to turn back now! As with the meatloaf a couple of nights ago, I am mixing by hand. Heat the biggest nonstick skillet you have with a little olive oil on high heat. Chug your coffee because between pureeing your veggies, having to corral children, and making meatballs you forgot to drink it and it's about 2 minutes away from being in the "too cold" category to drink.

Yes, you can see a hand print in there from where I hand mixed. 

Cook your 1-inch "meatballs" over the high heat for about 5 minutes. They don't smell like meatballs at all. I truly mean that. They don't bring back memories of a short Irish-Italian man frying meatballs and dumping them in to his huge pot of spaghetti. As someone who loves smells, this is mildly concerning. As someone desperate to get the diet of her family on track and willing to try new things, I'll live. After the balls are brown, add in the pureed tomatoes, 1/2 cup of water (to thin it I guess?), carrot puree, garlic powder, cayenne pepper, bay leaf if using (I'm not), and salt and pepper. I am once again eyeballing the spices because measuring them out is for sissies. Reduce heat to simmer and cook until the meatballs are done.

The meatballs look very yellow.....

While that is simmering, make the pasta. Here is the part where an allergy gets tricky. A lot of noodles are made in places where eggs are also used. This means 99% of the noodles at the grocery store down the road from me are automatically off-limits. I seriously found one box in the entire store that didn't have an egg warning on the label, and it wasn't even spaghetti but rigatoni. I decided that I wanted spaghetti this time! I went to Harris Teeter and picked up noodles there. The brand I got this time were called "Colavita." No allergen warnings and google had no hidden warnings to share! Follow the directions on the bag to make those. Angel Hair pasta from Colavita needed 3 minutes of boiling time. Pro Tip: After your noodles are boiled, drain them, put them back in a pot or bowl, dump sauce on them and stir it up so they don't stick together.

After the sauce and meatballs are completely together, throw it all together on plates and viola!

On the plate and to the table it goes! Cross your fingers and your toes!

And surprise of the evening: It was friggin GOOD! The only complaint I have is that there was not enough sauce. I am definitely doubling that part of the recipe in the future. Barrett and Rosalie ate all of their noodles and Olivia ate an entire plate and went back for seconds. Brian gave his approval as well and said it was definitely good. And if you're scoffing at the fact that we didn't eat ham, cabbage, and black-eyed peas today, well it hasn't helped us with luck and riches in the past! Far better to make a meal everyone will actually eat!

Starting Fresh, No Pun Intended, and Day 1 Recap

Living with food allergies is difficult. Cooking with limitations has involved a huge learning curve that still has me researching to figure out recipes. In some ways, having food allergies means a healthier selection of foods. In others, it means that sometimes you find an easy and unhealthy food choice and cling to it for dear life when you need or want a simple alternative to meal times.

For over a week now, my family has been dealing with a monster of a cold. The cough is lingering for myself and the youngest member of our family, and my husband is still majorly congested. I can barely talk, and frankly I am tired of it. Have you ever tried to speak over the volume of 4 kids and their new toys? It's not fun. If I try really hard, I can get a really loud yell out to get their attention, but it hurts and I cough for like two minutes after. 

Now frankly, I know in part that my sickness is due to my lack of attention to my own care. It's not easy finding time to plan healthy meals and prepare them with an extremely needy baby. Then there is the nightly struggle of getting the kids to eat. My menu had grown stale with old standbys. Taco Tuesday was more like Taco Tuesday, Fajita Friday, and Burrito Sunday! Hey, everyone actually likes Tex-Mex night and eats it pretty well. Then there were also the many nights we were eating out lately. It's not something I am proud of. Some nights Brian would come home and I was barely holding it together, dinner would not even be started because Caleb had been a wreck, so we would go out. Sure our choices for eating out were very limited with my son's extreme food allergies, but that wouldn't stop us. Blah blah excuses excuses. So last week I decided it was time for a change. It's time to save our diets, my waistline (because the husband hasn't gained a pound during all of this. 4 pregnancies later and he's still skinny), and our budget. And I was going to do it all while trying new ideas!

I bought this cookbook called Deceptively Delicious back in February. I was ambitious and very pregnant at the time. I got the cookbook, saw all of the meals that involved using eggs and milk, and promptly gave up. I was also extremely iron deficient and had three kids under age 6 already. So I decided to start this week with that cookbook. I flipped through some of the recipes. Where I once saw milk, eggs, and cheese, I was now scoffing at myself and realizing how easily I could substitute ingredients. So on Thursday night, I began. Night 1's menu included Italian Meatloaf and Mashed Potatoes. I am sorry for the lack of pictures, if that is what you are looking for. Maybe in the future I'll redo this and take photos for any visual learners out there. If anyone is curious as to how we eat without eggs, milk, or peanuts, this is how you do it!

The recipe is fairly simple. I almost always pre-chop my foods to make cooking smoother. 1/2 onion and 2 stalks of celery should be finely chopped. The puree part I totally cheated with. Since I started this on a whim, I chopped up some carrots, threw them in  pyrex bowl with a little bit of water, covered and steamed them slowly in the microwave a minute at a time. 1 minute cook, stir, 1 minute cook, stir, etc. I think it took 3 minutes of heat to make them fork tender. Then I popped those bad boys in the Nutribullet with a little of the water they had steamed in and pureed their little butts. The first actual ingredient in the recipe is 1 cup Italian-style breadcrumbs, which are an absolute no-go with the dietary restrictions in our house. Instead, I use panko breadcrumbs and season as needed for each recipe. Since these are supposed to be Italian, I can add parsley, onion and garlic powders, and oregano. I don't actually measure my seasonings. I just shake some in and stir until I deem it looks correct. 

The next ingredient is 1/2 cup of skim milk. That one is easy enough to substitute. I like to use original unsweetened almond milk to replace low fat and skim milks. It's thin enough and has none of the added sugars, so it won't overwhelm a recipe with sweetness. While the oven is preheating to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, soak the breadcrumbs in the milk.  I'm not sure if it was just me, but it was more like the breadcrumbs soaked up the milk and it took a bit of stirring to get the crumbs all moistened. I set it aside for a few. I put some olive oil in a pan and turned it on medium-high heat, and when it was hot, threw in the onions. I cooked those about 7 minutes and then added the celery, cooking for about 3 minutes more. After that, the veggies are removed from heat and mixed in with the breadcrumb mixture. If you're thinking that it looks a tad lumpy and this doesn't look right, just keep mixing, it's fine. (I was thinking "there should be more milk than this. I need to add more milk. But I won't." And I didn't which was good. Purees are coming so it will be moist enough. And yes I said MOIST MOIST MOIST!!). 

Now the recipe calls for you to add in 1 pound of lean ground turkey, 1/2 cup of Parmesan cheese, 1/2 cup of carrot puree, 1/4 cup of ketchup (you can be fancy and make your own but I was not fancy that day), and salt and pepper, then stir. Fun fact: Parmesan cheese is a cheese. Cheese is made from milk. That milk is the same cow's milk we call DAIRY. Barrett is allergic to anything that comes from a cow's udders. This is news to quite a few people. So, Parmesan cheese was an absolute no-go for this experiment....I mean recipe. I didn't replace it with anything, either, as it isn't necessary to hold the loaf together. I washed my hands really good and mixed the whole concoction by hand. The recipe says "Stir," but let's face it, hand kneading a meatloaf is just the way it's done in my house. Stirring makes me feel like I didn't get all of the solid ingredients mixed up well enough. Oh and it feels disgusting to mix and knead by hand, FYI. Absolutely disgusting. 

So then you mash that bad boy in to a loaf pan, or if you're like me and your baking cabinet is a disaster from Christmas and you can't find the loaf pan you could have sworn you had, put it in one of those small pyrex baking dishes in a loaf sort of shape. It will be okay (so I told myself, and again I was right). You're supposed to add one cup of bottled tomato sauce to the top. I did not have bottled tomato sauce, so I popped open a can and used a cup of that. Okay, it was probably more than a cup. I wasn't rinsing out my measuring cup to measure a topping for meatloaf, let's be real. Finally, you take 4 slices of turkey bacon and lay it on the top. I was seriously tempted to use real pig bacon, but I sucked it up and got out the turkey bacon. "Be healthy" I whispered. Turkey bacon on a turkey based meatloaf makes more sense than delicious pig bacon on a turkey loaf.....I guess. Pop that sucker in the oven for 45 to 50 minutes or until the bacon begins to brown and the meatloaf is no longer pink inside. You know your oven. Mine had to go just short of 50 minutes for the turkey bacon to look done although the meatloaf was cooked on the inside by 45.

While that was baking, it was time to turn my attention to the mashed potatoes. For any potato recipe to be correct, you must say "PO-TA-TO" like Samwise Gamgee in The Two Towers, by the way. That is a requirement in my house. The pound of baking potatoes had already been peeled and popped in just enough water to cover them. When the meatloaf went in, I turned the stove on high heat and boiled them. You do know how to boil cubed potatoes right? Well just in case, you bring it to a boil and then simmer for like 15 minutes until they are fork tender. 15 minutes does just fine for my cubes. Smaller cubes usually means faster cook time. Don't dice them too small though or all the starch starts cooking out and it turns in to a mess and won't strain right. While it was boiling, I cheated wtih the 1/2 cup of cauliflower puree the same way I did the carrot puree. Dice it, microwave steam, and nutribullet. When the potatoes are done, drain them, mash them up, and stir in the cauliflower puree. The recipe book says to add 1/2 cup of buttermilk and 2 tablespoons of a tub margarine spread. Let's not get fancy here, though. I added 1/2 cup of the same kind of almond milk I used earlier, as well as 2 tablespoons of Earth Balance soy free spread. Easy peasy. It got done just as the meatloaf was coming out of the oven. 

 Pull out the meatloaf, cut in to slices, say "oh crap" because the thing is so moist that some of your slices are falling apart, and serve to your family with a huge spoonful of mashed potatoes on the side. 

Let me tell you, first of all, I am so glad my husband keeps an open mind about food I prepare. In 7 years of marriage and about 9 years of cooking for him, there has only been like 2 times ever he didn't like what I made. When I first spoke the words "meatloaf with ground turkey" he didn't make any weird faces or say "I'm not eating that." When I told him it was covered in turkey bacon, he didn't protest that turkey bacon isn't "real bacon," which I definitely say. He said "We can give it a try." I love that man. So I set the plates on the table, I shot him a look that said "yeah I know it looks weird," we said the blessing, and took the first bite. It was actually really good! Even the kids liked it! All in all, it was a big win for me. After everyone went to bed I pureed more vegetables and pureed the next day's breakfast and lunch, which I will recap later. 

Yay! Day 1 success!