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.

Nigella's Lone Linguine (but with spaghetti)

I had today off and went to a workshop about creating and giving museum tours instead, then had coffee with my friend Serena to commiserate about the pain of jobs.

James went to Oxford to see Mogwai, so I made Nigella's Lone Linguine with White Truffle. It's principally pasta with egg, butter, cream, pepper and truffle oil. Possibly not the healthiest of food, but it takes a few minutes - unless you're faffing about looking for ingredients and watching the iplayer like me - and the creaminess lessens mid-week despair a bit.

I used spaghetti instead of linguine since that's what I have, and I also believe they're the same except spaghetti is more tubular.

I find some pasta different, like I find fusili takes longer to cook than spaghetti, and I know the shells are better for sauce-type things that can settle in the little holes in the shells, and you can stuff the bigger shells. I think that pasta is mostly interchangeable and I use whatever I have.

This is what I believe.

I don't have enough kitchen space to justify having many different pasta types for different sauce types - I only keep two kinds: a long, thin pasta (I currently have spaghetti) and a representative from the chunky pasta family (currently: shells/conchiglie).

Truffle oil sounds fancy but can easily be got. Obviously there are artisan truffle oils just as there is artisan everything else (including spoons) but I used the fresh from the supermarket variety myself.



Urbani truffle oil, from Waitrose (review of bottle: bottle needs better screwcap).

I'm aware of the truffle oil controversy, but this is how I figure it: I'm not harvesting a truffle anytime soon, but I can get a 4.99 bottle of truffle oil to experiment with. With a 4.99 bottle I won't fear disappointment. Somehow I have a little bubbling feeling that truffles are massively over-rated. Possibly because they're rare and French.

My pasta was lovely.



I made a few adjustments: used spaghetti instead of linguine, colourful ground peppercorns instead of white pepper, didn't add Parmesan, but added a little bit of mushroom pate instead, with a bit on the side.



Pate-moi pate. Amazing!

Monday night cajun chicken pasta

Cajun Chicken Pasta: result!


I did make the cajun chicken pasta from the Pioneer Woman website yesterday with slight modifications. I left out the white wine and used a cup of chicken stock (from cube). I also used a cup of single cream instead of 'thick cream' as we had some left over from a fruit salad, and simmered the sauce for longer.
I'm not sure what thick cream is, but I believe single cream is equivalent to the American half and half.
I replaced the cube roma tomatoes with cherry tomatoes and cooked them until their skins began to break and they got a bit squishy. Squished. Also used two different pasta - the last of the fussili and some spaghetti. I also used lots of cajun spice. Lots. You want to watch out for that cajun spice from hell.
Didn't do much after that, we watched Blossom on the YouTube. There's not really any other way to get hold of Blossom episodes beyond season one due to music licensing issues - unless you can get hold of old videotapes.