Spaghetti Sauce for Potlucks

When you need to make a lot of spaghetti sauce for potluck dinner, here's a trick for stretching your sauce out for a group. It may sound weird, but a great substitute for vegeburger in your sauce is carrots - grated carrots. There are two ways to prepare them for spaghetti sauce.

Ingredients:

• Olive oil
• Spaghetti Sauce and or Italian tomato sauce/tomatoes
• Carrots (I like the peeled baby carrots for speed and convenience)
• Extra vegetables like mushrooms, onions, peppers, etc.
• Vegeburger or textured vegetable program

Directions:

1. Either grate up a whole bunch of carrots (that's very scientific measurement, so measure carefully) or you can chop up the carrots in a food processors. This gives the carrots a texture like vegeburger if you don't chop them up too much. The sauteeing process will soften the carrots.
2. Saute the carrots in olive oil. I do it in a Wok so I have room to add lots of sauce and other veges. 
3. Add any other veges and saute them till they are all a nice soft kind of caramelized texture
4. Pour in as much sauce as you want.

Note:
Once your sauce is thoroughly cooked you can either put it in a big covered bowl to take to potluck with another bowl of spaghetti and let people put the two together at the potluck dinner.  The other thing you can do is mix the spaghetti and the sauce in advance and take it in one bigger bowl. The carrots give you a nice sweet taste and a texture like burger.

© 2016 by Tom King

 

Spaghetti and Neatballs

Since it was just me, I hogged up most of the Neatballs.

There's some new Vegan products out from a company called "Neat Foods", a subsidiary of my sponsor, Atlantic Natural Foods. The first of their products that I tried was their Italian vegeburger mix. The stuff comes in an envelope as a powder. Instructions for making it up are on the package.  The mix contains pecans, garbanzo beans, gluten free whole grain oats, garlic, onion, sea salt and spcies. It's vegan if you don't use eggs and leave out the Parmesan and use their egg substitute in the recipe and perhaps some grated tofu or something. (I used eggs and Parmesan).

The recipe for "Neatballs" is on the package.  It works like this.

Ingredients:

• 1 egg (or substitute)
• 1 TBSP water
• 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
• 1 package Neat Italian Mix®

Directions:

1. Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl and mix it up well. It should be nice and thick.
2. Roll the mix into balls - a package makes about 8 healthy sized Neatballs.
3. Place the balls on a greased cookie sheet or you can do like I did and bake them on nonstick aluminum foil.
4. Bake them at 350° for 15 to 18 minutes. Try not to over cook them.
5. While they are baking, prepare your spaghetti according to directions on the box and heat up some spaghetti sauce in a saucepan. 
6. Put spaghetti on your plate and top with cooked Neatballs and spaghetti sauce.

Note:
If you're taking this to potluck you can double the recipe, make smaller Neatballs (cook for a shorter period of time since they are smaller) and then mix up the sauce, cooked spaghetti and Neatballs in a big casserole dish and take it that way - kind of Chef Boyardee style. It's simpler that way. They are pretty good I thought. See what you think. Check the Atlantic Natural Foods link for info on where you can get Neat® Products. 

© 2016 by Tom King