Fridays dinner

I changed my mind yesterday....decided to cook meat balls with linguine and home made tomato sauce then apple crumble.

I changed my mind as Olivia had a friend stay over. You can't really go wrong with this dish.

Later today if I have time I will post the Apple crumble. This has a video to help.

You will see in this recipe that I use 500g of steak mince. When I bought my mince I bought a 700g pack. Im going to use the other 200g to make burgers just like macdonald's.....the kids love my home burgers and when you say it's just like Macdonalds you can get away with just adding salt and pepper!!! How easy is that.

Prep time: It took me about 10 miuntes to prep the balls & about 5 minutes to prep the tomato sauce. The cooking time for the tomato sauce is about 40 minutes and the cooking time for the meat balls is about 12-15 minutes.

You will need either a food processer, hand held blitzer or smoothie blender for the tomato sauce.

First you need to start the tomato sauce. This will save you 10 minutes in the whole process.

Tomato sauce

Ingredients:

• 2 carrots diced
• 2 diced onions
• 2 crushed cloves of garlic
• Good pinch of dried mix herbs
• 1 tin of tomatoes
• I oxo veg stock cube
• 800ml water
• 50g tomato puree
• 25g brown sugar

Method:

• Warm a pan with a little olive oil and add the carrots, onions & garlic
• Cook for about 8/10 minutes on a medium heat making sure you do not colour too much
• Add water, stock cube, tomato paste, dried mixed herbs & sugar
• Bring to the boil then simmer. This will take about 30 minutes to cook out
• Once carrots are soft you need to blitz until smooth
• Then add seasoning and the meat balls

Meat balls

Ingredients:

• 500g steak mince
• 1 oxo beef cube
• 1 finely diced onion
• Pinch dry mixed herbs
• 3 pick stems of Lemon tyme (only use the leaf not the stem)
• Salt & pepper

Method:

• Mix all ingredients in a bowl
• This mix will give you 15 meat balls (approx 40g per meat ball)

To cook the meat balls place in the tomato sauce and cook for 12/15 minutes on a medium heat. When this is cooking you need to cook the linguine.

As a rule all dry pasta will take about 8 / 10 minutes to cook. If you're not too sure how much to cook per person I always go with: for children use 50g & for adult use 100g of dry pasta as the pasta will double in weight.





I made garlic bread to accompany this dish. I have posted the flat bread recipe beofre just follow the basic recipe using 2 crushed cloves of garlic in the mix then 15g of sliced butter on the top before cooking in the oven. 170*c for about 8 / 10 on middle shelf. I made this after making the meat balls, while the tomato sauce was cooking.

I am always looking for feed back so please feel free to comment on any of the blogs...

Enjoy peeps :)