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Back in mid November the weather forecasters scared us into staying home telling us we were about to be hit by Snowmegadon. We had a little ice in the morning but nothing like we were threatened with. By then Carla and I were in the mood to make something warm and comforting. Jay next door loves spaghetti and he had an unpleasant duty coming up so we invited them over for spaghetti and meatballs from scratch. We used a trusty old America’s Test Kitchen recipe that I rated at 5 stars back in 2010.

Carla went to the store and got everything we needed while I worked a bit on work stuff. Carla made the sauce and I started on the meatballs around 4:00. Later the Watsons brought over their pasta maker and we made the noodles. I was working when Carla made the sauce so no pictures.

The meatballs are rich and hearty: buttermilk, ground beef, ground pork, and prosciutto

I rolled them into roughly golf ball shaped size and put them on a wire rack over a baking sheet.

It’s so much easier to roast them then cook them in a pan. Here they are out of the oven.

You can see that nice melty Parmesan Reggiano  holding them together. Then they went into the simmering sauce to complete cooking.

We ate some appetizers and made the noodles while the sauce simmered.

We had a wonderful evening as always and look forward to next time.

It’s interesting that I rated this so highly in the past. The meatballs are definitely 5 star but I was not as impressed with the sauce this time; it was too runny and dominated by the taste of tomato juice. If you want to make this dish, use the meatballs from the recipe above but go with Miles Hassel’s Marinara Sauce. Dr. Hassell is a physician here in the Portland area (he was my father-in-law’s doctor) and he gives seminars on good cooking and eating. He publishes a cook book called “Good Food, Great Medicine” which is based on the Mediterranean diet. If you search around my blog you’ll find some delicious and healthy recipes.

I helped carry a couple of things back over to the Watsons and grabbed a picture of our poor little maple tree with frozen leaves.

As a result, we didn’t get real colorful fall leaves this year; all the trees in the hood turned a dirty yellow and fell off.