Can’t say I blame him for wanting more. There’s something so satisfying about twirling freshly cooked spaghetti around your fork and shoveling those slippery noodles into your mouth. And when those noodles are tossed in a ultra creamy, luscious sauce it’s 100% better. The creamy sauce is packed with the richest flavors. Sweet sun dried tomatoes are incorporated two ways, blended into the nondairy milk to make a tomatoey cream and minced morsels are tossed at the end for extra bursts of that intense sun dried tomato flavor. Tomato paste adds some incredible depth of flavor and body to the sauce, as well as giving it a pink hue. Miso gives a slightly cheesy, umami-rich funk to the cream. And a hearty splash of wine is my favorite well-known secret of adding a lot of aged flavor to a creamy sauce. Thickened with an olive oil-based roux and topped with some chiffonade basil, this sauce is perfect on spaghetti. The chickpea meatballs are adapted from my vegan meatball pepita pesto pizza recipe. I really love these savory balls and love how versatile they are. This time I made them with brown basmati rice and pecans, as that is what I had on hand. The brown rice (instead of my regularly used bulgur) added a great chewiness to the recipe, as well as being a bit stickier and as a result requiring less bread crumbs to help hold them together. I also streamlined the ingredient list a bit, and to be honest they still held so much flavor I didn’t even notice! Especially when paired with the flavor-rich sun dried tomato cream sauce. Spaghetti is a nostalgic food for me, as it was the first dish I learned how to make for myself. When I was 9 or 10, I would cook a bowlful of spaghetti and pour some jarred tomato sauce over top and enjoy it for lunch–just about every day of the week during the summer! I got really good at proportioning exactly the right amount of spaghetti for a single serving. A skill that has lasted me to this day, though not one I employ often now. I can’t help but think of my summer sports camp filled days whenever I cook spaghetti. But I will say I much prefer this grownup version of it! 🙂 I hope you try this dish. We really loved the sauce, and it’s such an easy dinner! The chickpea meatballs could be made in advance, but they really are quite easy to make and totally doable on a weeknight. Get them in the oven and then make the sauce and cook the pasta while you’re baking them and dinner is ready in well under an hour! If you make it please let me know, I love seeing & hearing about it when you guys make my recipes! Leave a comment and/or rate the recipe below, tag me on Instagram, or let me know on Facebook!
Notes:
For the nondairy milk, I highly recommend using unsweetened as tomatoes are naturally sweet and you don’t want to intensify that. I used a homemade almond milk (1 part nuts: 2 parts water) for this recipe and also tested it using cashew milk (same 1:2 ratio, but no need to strain with a nut milk bag). Store bought milk should also work nicely, but again, I would use plain unsweetened.Easily make gluten free by subbing in gluten free breadcrumbs or a gluten free flour blend in the chickpea meatballs, and making the gluten free subs for the spaghetti and flour in the sauce.To keep the sauce a prettier pink color you can use white wine instead of red, the red wine makes the sauce a little darker. Or for an alcohol free version, leave out the wine.
*adapted from my Vegan Meatball Pesto Pizza
KAL Nutritional Yeast Flakes | Vitamin B12, Vegan, Non-GMO, Gluten Free
