Monday, June 20, 2005

Meatballs in Tomato Sauce

The Feeding Babies and Small Children chapter is turning out to be surprisingly profitable, especially considering that the youngest person in our house is 21!

31. Meatballs in Tomato Sauce

These are kind of similar to the tagliatelle and meatballs from Nigella Bites, except that the meatball mixture is slightly different, you fry the meatballs before adding them to the sauce, and the sauce itself starts off with a soffritto of carrot, onion, garlic and celery. What I love about this sauce though, is its bright orange colour! It goes orange when you add the milk, and looks so happy and cheerful!

I’m not sure how many the recipe is supposed to serve, but Nigella suggests making it in a large quantity so that there are leftovers for freezing. I however, did not want to add to my already bursting freezer, and having been overwhelmed by Nigella’s exceedingly generous portions in the past, I halved the recipe.


My serving

Nigella says that she gets about 46 meatballs from 1 kilo of meat. Bizarrely, I got 50 balls from about 500g of meat, which means that either my balls are too small, or I am too generous with my meat. Either way, no biggie, it tasted good. Another thing, I found that the sauce thickened too much – I think it evaporates faster in half-quantities – and thus couldn’t accommodate all the balls. So I just topped it up with some more water.


Meatballs - the perfect quantity for the four of us

Daniel: Dinner’s at 7? Aw, I can’t eat, I gotta go study in the library.
Me: Well that’s ok, have some leftovers before you go if you’re hungry.
Daniel: Hey, what’s that smell?
Me: What, this? ... Points to pot... That’s dinner tonight!
Daniel: Well I guess I’m staying home then!

And it was delicious! We had it with rice, as per Nigella’s suggestion, which I liked, but my family said they’d prefer it with pasta next time. And there will definitely be a next time!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

These look smashing. Have you made the meatballs in Nigella Bites? and if so how did these compare?

Annauk