Recipe 3: Spaghetti and Beanballs

I was really excited to make this recipe. I'm a total pasta lover and love trying new "faux meat" dishes.

Overall impressions:

Difficulty factor: Simple
Price factor: Relatively inexpensive
Taste factor: Yum
Cleanup factor: Easy

We enjoyed this dish. I'd say Bryan enjoyed it more than I did, but mostly because I was hoping the beanballs would have a bit more give and chew to them. Bryan ain't down with that, so he really liked the softer, less chewy texture.

The homemade pasta sauce was extremely easy and very tasty. It felt very authentic and healthy. I've made tasty homemade sauce before, but it's smooth as I usually buy whole, canned tomatoes and add them and the other ingredients in a blender. So we appreciated the little pops of flavor with the chunks of tomato in this sauce.

Since this only called for 1/4 tsp of lemon zest, what I did was zest the entire lemon and freeze the rest of the zest. Why buy a whole lemon and only use part of it. Oh, and I also squeezed the juice and stored that in a little bottle for future use.

I also used a whole pound of pasta instead of 1/2. Hey, didn't I say we like our pasta? I was worried it would come out dry, but it was just about right for us. For most recipes that call for 1/2 pound of pasta, I usually use a whole pound and it almost always works out just right for us.
Okay, so that's not a money-saving tip, but at least pasta is cheap. And it makes twice as much in the end.

For the beanballs, I used the oven method. It meant less oil splattering and thus less stovetop cleanup, although I'll probably try the pan fried method next time. We do likes us some fried foods!

This recipe is on page 189 of Veganomicon.