Pasta and Meatballs - Part 2

Before heading out of town last week, I did prepare supper on Tuesday. I used the same meatball recipe as previously detailed in my Pasta and Meatballs post. However, this time, I went with a garlic and olive pasta with diced tomatoes. The recipe is super simple. It contains:
- 2 cups of uncooked elbow pasta
- 3/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil
- 6 or so cloves of garlic, chopped
- 1 1/2 tsp sea salt
- 4 tbsp. dried parsley
- Pepper to taste
- 14.5 oz. can of petite diced tomatoes, drained

I usually chop the garlic and add it to a skillet with the olive oil and let it sit for as long as practical, usually as long as it takes to put the meatballs together. I then heat the oil and garlic over medium heat for a few minutes until the garlic starts to show color and then add the salt, parsley, and pepper and stir it all in the skillet before pouring it over the pasta. Don't let the garlic brown and get bitter, just make sure it has a bit of color to it. After adding the mixture from the skillet, I add the canned tomatoes and stir it all up. The result is unintentionally quite festive looking and super tasty. Since the olive oil will inevitably settle to the bottom of the pasta, make sure you stir it well just before plating it up.

Pasta and Meatballs

I have developed a new go-to meal over the past few months after catching an episode of Good Eats on The Food Network entitled 'Meatballs For All'. The recipe is for baked meatballs. The only changes I make to the recipe are to use a package of low fat ground turkey (1.3 lbs.) and 1/4 lb. of lean ground beef and to act as if spinach had never been mentioned anywhere near a meatball. That is of course unless we are talking about Campbell's Italian-Style Wedding Soup, in which case the spinach is quite literally swimming in deliciousness and is therefore completely acceptable given that I can't actually taste it. But I digress.

The meatballs cook up quite deliciously and I add a side of pasta to go with them. I had been making an olive oil and garlic pasta with some diced tomatoes (full documentation will inevitably follow in a future post). However, this past week I decided to prepare a "homemade" pasta sauce as detailed in our Joy of Cooking cookbook. I'll spare you all the details, but essentially it is just combining an onion, carrots, garlic, tomatoes (I use a 28 oz. can of whole tomatoes), sugar, and a couple herbs and spices and running it all through a food processor once it has cooked down a bit. Very simple but quite delicious. I have been using Barilla Plus pastas of late and have found that the elbow variety is very good.

Here's the finished product. The poor quality of the pictures defy how good the meal really is.