My easy carrot meatball spaghetti

One of the foods I like is meatballs. There's some form of a meat-related ball, eg. potato balls with meat, eaten different ways in what seems like almost every type of cuisine. Meatballs are easy to make successfully and all kinds of flavours can be achieved with different additions to the meatball. I've made Swedish meatballs and kofta, but on Wednesday I made my carrot meatball spaghetti, using everyday larder items and some of the multi-coloured carrots we got with the veg box delivery.

To make the meatballs, I mixed:
400g ground beef
1 tsp dried Italian herbs
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp allspice
1tsp ground black pepper
60ml milk
1 egg
50g breadcrumbs (I used boxed breadcrumbs)

Shape into small balls and placed them in an oiled baking tin. They will need to firm up a bit or they'll fall apart during cooking. I clingfilmed them and put them in the fridge while I continued my preparations.

The carrots came in different colours: purple, white and regular. When peeled the purple carrots were a rich deep purple, almost black, with a bright orange core.

Peeled purple carrot on left

I peeled four carrots and sliced them with my mini food processor.

Quartered two onions and ran them through the food processor again.

Lovely machine-sliced onions. I lack knife skills, but fortunately gadgets exist. Cooking dinner is not Masterchef, lack of knife skills shouldn't deter one from attempting to cook.

I took the meatballs out of the fridge and started frying them in my handy little electrical frying pan. I like it because of the sliding temperature adjuster, which makes me feel safer when cooking things like meatballs. I always worry a bit about cooking them all the way through.


Then put the sliced onions on and fry those together.

While frying and ensuring that the beef is cooked through, I started boiling the spaghetti and washed and quartered four tomatoes. I chucked those on top.

Opened a can of tomatoes and put that in too. I stood over it mixing for some time, making sure everything was cooked and adding pepper. Then I put the lid on, turned the heat down and let it simmer for a while.

Carrot meatball spaghetti.

The purple carrots are better and have more of a sweet carroty taste than regular carrots. I am now a fan of the purple carrot. I could try to grow them despite this year's carrot failure. My carrots looked like little, malformed people.