Easy Mediterranean Lentil Meatballs
I spent most of the past four months in Northern California at my dad’s house. After my mom died everyone converged on the house, and in short order a lot of other things fell apart. No one went home for a long time. I made some strange decisions about what to bring when I loaded the car that initial morning – watercolors, a stack of cookbooks, my camera, a favorite knife, a huge bin full of spices. I thought about bringing my favorite donabe, but was worried it could break and grabbed my pasta machine instead. Not a bad call – a lot of pasta was made! My nephew is especially enthusiastic about it, so I decided to branch out to a new shape – cavatelli.
The move to cavatelli was partially out of necessity. My workhorse, the Atlas pasta machine, has issues at my dad’s house. There is nothing to clamp it on to. Every countertop and table is too thick. It’s maddening. I noticed the clamp on the cavatelli maker seemed like it might be wider, so I thought we’d try it instead. It is also worth mentioning, I’ve been meaning to buy a cavatelli maker for years. Ragazza, a sweet little Italian spot, was just up the street from where we lived in San Francisco. The owner Sharon tipped me off to how she made their cavatelli from scratch with a little hand-cranked machine (something like this one) – and I’ve meant to get my hands on once since. This seemed like the right time.
After a good amount of experimenting, I’ve settled on the following as my basic cavatelli dough and technique. Once you master it, the variations you can explore are endless (see below). The cavatelli machine likes pasta dough that’s not-too-wet and not-too-dry. If you hit the sweet spot, you’ll be able to crank out a pound of cavatelli incredibly quickly. If your dough is getting stuck in your machine, pat it with flour, dust off any excess, and try again. You’ll eventually get a feel for it!
Not a big deal! You can make it by hand a number of other ways. Here’s a page that demonstrates how to shape cavatelli with a ridged board, fork, or grater. I’ve also seen it shaped traditionally in Puglia using something like a butter knife.
Cavatelli is traditionally made with durum wheat semolina flour. But, if you don’t have that on hand, don’t let it stop you. Last week I was out of semolina flour, so the cavatelli you see pictured here was made with “00” flour. “00” is powder-fine and made with low gluten, soft wheat flour. If you don’t have “00” you can certainly use all-purpose flour. A long way of saying, make cavatelli with 100% semolina flour if you have it, or use equal parts “00” and semolina, or just “00″….go for the all-purpose flour if that’s what you have.
Freezing is my preferred method of storing any cavatelli I’m not cooking immediately. Arrange freshly made, uncooked cavatelli across a floured baking sheet. Try to make sure they’re in a single layer. Freeze for a couple of hours, and then transfer to double layer plastic bags. You can freeze for up to a couple of months. And you can cook straight from the freezer. No need to thaw, just dump the cavatelli into boiling salted water, and increase the cooking time a bit.
In the recipe below you can see how you can tweak basic cavatelli pasta dough by adding different seasonings and spices. I wanted to make a bright, sunny plate of pasta with lots of roasted yellow and orange vegetables and ingredients like cauliflower, golden yellow beets, and winter squash (pictured above). I added turmeric and black pepper to the pasta dough for a little flavor, color, and boost. The possibilities are endless here.
You can also play around with the water. In place of water you can use vegetable juices, purees, stocks or broths, anything of that sort is fair game.
Making fresh pasta is one of my favorite things to do. It’s even better when you have others around to help, taking turns in shifts. I did a basic primer on making homemade pasta a while ago, if you love fettuccine noodles or anything along those lines, start there. You can also try making gnocchi (it’s perfect with this pesto), here’s a beautiful beet fettuccine, and a favorite simple tomato sauce. And all my pasta recipes live here. Enjoy!
See the notes in the post above related to flour choices. Basically, semolina flour is traditional, but you can use “00” flour, semolina flour, or a combination of the two.
Serves 4 – Makes 1 pound dough.
The post Homemade Cavatelli appeared first on 101 Cookbooks
Don’t you just love it when a recipe is as simple as ‘mix + bake’? No pre-cooking, no unnecessary extra steps – just mix together all of the ingredients, and pop it in the oven. And that’s just the case for these vegetarian lentil meatballs (lentil balls? vegeballs? meatlessballs?). They couldn’t be easier.
Other easy ‘mix and bake’ recipes → easy nut roast; baked fajita rice; Boursin pasta.
I served my lentil balls with spaghetti and tomato sauce – spaghetti and meatballs is such a classic that’s hard to improve on. If you prefer, you could equally serve these vegetarian meatballs with couscous and tzatziki, stuffed into pitta bread, or even just eaten straight from the oven (no judgment here). They’re packed with Mediterranean-inspired flavours, and they’re super versatile.
The basic recipe for these lentil meatballs is canned lentils + flour + egg (the same base I used for my cheesy lentil burgers). Once you’ve got that far, you can jazz things up however you like. I added:
If you like, you could easily switch things up to bring a different flavour profile to your meatballs – maybe you could make a Tex-Mex version, or use some Indian spices, for example.
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Here’s what you’ll need to make these vegetarian meatballs. See the printable recipe card below for detailed ingredient quantities.
You could certainly mix together the ingredients in advance, and then store the mixture in a sealed container in the fridge for a day or so, until you’re ready to shape and bake the balls. The meatballs are tastiest when freshly baked, but if needed, you could even bake them in advance, and then reheat when you’re ready to eat them.
I didn’t experiment with freezing these balls, but it’s the sort of recipe I have had luck with freezing in the past, so I definitely think it’s worth a try.
The easiest way to reheat these lentil meatballs is in the microwave. They do dry out a little and lose their crispiness when reheated, but they’re still tasty. Alternatively, you could re-crisp them in the oven or air fryer.
I served my meatballs with spaghetti and tomato sauce, which worked beautifully. You could alternatively serve them stuffed into pitta bread with some tzatziki, or alongside some mashed potato.
The post Easy Mediterranean Lentil Meatballs appeared first on Easy Cheesy Vegetarian.
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