Spaghetti and Meatballs!

Gotcha! You didn't really think I had spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, did you? It does look pretty good though. This is actually butternut squash noodles with garlic parsley sauce and yes, meatballs. I was debating whether to title this post "Fun with Toys," since the creation of these beautiful noodles required both a spiralizer and a dehydrator.



You can pretty much take any starchy vegetable, cut it into thin ribbons (much easier with the spiralizer than by hand), give it a little salt, warmth, and time and it will soften into nutritious noodles. Zucchini, sweet potatoes, and squash are all great candidates. Zucchini transforms into exceptionally soft noodles. I have been thinking that this tool would make it much easier for me to create healthy weeknight pasta dishes, so I finally bought myself (and my eager roommates) one for Christmas.



Noodles just after getting spiralized, they then need a little salt and about 30 min in the dehydrator or oven on the "warm" setting.

I had found a recipe years ago for raw butternut squash pasta with olive oil and garlic, and never could get it out of my head. Finally tonight I started formulating my sauce for the noodles, and this is what I came up with:

1/4 cup olive oil
juice from 2 lemons
small handful of parsley
3 cloves of garlic
2 anchovy fillets
1 heaping tablespoon plain yogurt for some creaminess
1 teaspoon capers

Throw everything in the blender, except capers, until not completely smooth, you still want good sized flecks of parsley. Add capers and give your blender one more buzz; they should be mostly intact.

I then served with grass fed beef meatballs. I didn't really follow a recipe, just added to the raw ground beef 1 egg, 2 cloves minced garlic, a dash of sesame seeds, salt & pepper. Formed into balls, then into the oven at 300 until they looked cooked on the outside. I still wanted them slightly rare on the inside, and this worked out well. If I was serving these to guests, I probably would have followed a recipe, but mine turned out pretty delicious, considering. Usually you add breadcrumbs and a whole mess of other ingredients to meatballs, but really folks, sometimes it's okay to free yourself from recipes! Add in what you like, cook 'em in a pan or in the oven, it's all okay.

There's something else going on with this dinner tonight, which is my newfound enthusiasm for a "paleo" diet. Actually it's not entirely newfound, it fits right in with my own experimenting on what makes me feel best: lots of fresh veggies, minimal wheat/gluten/grain, and small amounts of meat. I recently watched this video on evolutionary nutrition, and read this paper, both by Nutrition Scientist Loren Cordain. I was floored by how recently grains became cultivated and incorporated into the human diet. The entire time we have been eating grains, domesticated animals, salt, etc. only represents about 0.4% of the overall timeframe of human existence. Our genetic makeup is only estimated to have changed about 0.005% in that time. Then if you look at the incredibly dramatic changes that have been made to the human diet since the industrial revolution, clearly processed foods are inappropriate for our organism. Our genes are essentially still those of the hunter-gatherer. We are adapted to eat wild fruits (wild fruits are small and not that sweet, hence the sugar problems we face today), vegetables, nuts, seeds, and wild meats (wild meats are not that fatty, hence the cholesterol problems we face today).

I'm no scientist, but I do like to geek out about this stuff. You read lots of different things about nutrition, and in my opinion many of the sources out there are either trying to kowtow to some corporate interest, ahem canola oil, ahem soy, or are trying to dumb down the facts because they think real people won't want to make such radical changes.

Okay, so here's my real people version of spaghetti and meatballs, appropriately adjusted to foods we are more or less adapted to eat:

Ingredients
4 zucchini
Seeds of Change pasta sauce (one of the more additive-free jarred sauces out there)
1/2 lb grass fed ground beef
1/2 yellow onion, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 egg
sesame seeds (optional)
salt & pepper

Spiralize zucchini, or using a vegetable peeler peel long fat strips off the zucchini, then stack the strips and slice into long thin strands. Lightly salt and leave covered. Combine beef with all remaining ingredients, form into balls. In a medium hot skillet sear meatballs on all sides. Then bake in the oven at 350 for about 30 min. Combine pasta with sauce, top with meatballs. Serves 2.