Every day food: Meatballs, tomato sauce & spiralized zucchini

Meatballs are perhaps the most typical Swedish dish, traditionally served with mashed potatoes and lingonberries. Here I make meatballs with a scent of Italy.

Pasta made from soy beans is a good alternative to regular pasta if you want to keep the carbs down. But make sure to read the list of ingredients if you want a pasta consisting of 100% soy beans. Many variants still consists of about 60 % wheat flour.

4 people

Meatballs

500 g minced beef

10 g salt

1 clove of garlic

1 dl double cream

1 egg

50 g finely grated parmesan

Preheat the oven to 175°C/347°F. Mix all ingredients. Roll meatballs weighing approximately 40 grams each. There will be about 16 meatballs. Place your meatballs in an ovenproof tray and bake to a temperature of 67°C/153°F, about 20 minutes.

Tomato sauce

1 onion

2 cloves of garlic

½ carrot

1 tsp sambal oelek

1 large twig of fresh thyme

olive oil for frying

400 g crushed tomatoes

2 dl water

2 tbsp red wine vinegar

1 tsp dried oregano

salt

Shred the onion, garlic and carrot. Fry in a pan, along with sambal oelek and thyme, over medium heat without taking color. Add the remaining ingredients except the salt and cook together for about 30 minutes. Mix the sauce until smooth and season with salt.

Pesto

2 dl sunflower seeds

1 dl parmesan

1 clove of garlic

1 pot of fresh basil

1 dl olive oil

salt

Roast the sunflower seeds in a hot, dry pan. Let cool down. Grate the parmesan and garlic and pick the leaves from the basil. Mix all ingredients in a food processor to a desired consistency. I like it when it’s a little chunkier mixed. Season with salt.

For serving you also need freshly boiled pasta of soy beans, spiralized zucchini (if you don’t have a spiralizer, it works almost as fine to slice thinly with a vegetable peeler) and dried tomatoes. Dried tomatoes are easily done yourself in the oven or in a food dehydrator. More about that another time.

Arranging the dish

Blend together the freshly cooked pasta of soy beans with the hot tomato sauce and meatballs and arrange in a deep bowl. Garnish with some nice green herbs, in my case fresh oregano. Blend the spiralized zucchini with pesto and then garnish with dried tomatoes.

Peter Olsson, ”Chefabetic”

Recipe published 19th of May 2016