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shocking: cursed woman makes cursed spaghetti and "meatballs"

this is the tale of my cursed spaghetti and meatballs.

i cannot eat beyond or impossible brand “meats” because they are made with coconut oil and one of my personality traits is that coconut makes me red, itchy, and unable to breathe (and they say superheroes don’t exist!). but a few weeks ago i found this brand, the meatless farm co, who makes ground beef without coconut oil, so i grabbed a package of it.

then, while putting it into my freezer, i remembered that i didn’t even like ground beef when i wasn’t vegan, so it sat in said freezer, untouched, until last night when i decided to make spaghetti and meatballs.

please enjoy my recipe for Cursed Spaghetti And Meatballs™

it’s cool that fake ground beef is not made of real ground beef, but that doesn’t make the fake meat look any more appetizing to handle. also, like, what if they used real meat just to fuck with us? after about 5 minutes of pacing back and forth as i came to terms with this uncanny valley of fake flesh, i finally put half the package in a bowl and added the following wet things:

• 3 shishito peppers chopped (i wish i had jalapeno though)
• ¼ large white onion, chopped
• a few leaves of fresh basil, chopped
• some minced garlic
• a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce and olive oil

and then my attention deficit hit. i was cooking while music was playing AND i was watching youtube videos of people making hats for their little frogs and, once i snapped out of it, all of the other ingredients i had added were on my cursed kitchen table, lined up around a new round stain which i caused with a hot bowl of chili earlier this week.

• freshly ground salt and pepper
• parsley
• garlic powder
• onion powder
• oregano

speaking of “round,” i rolled up the meatballs with my hands, oiled a pan and threw them in the oven at 425 degrees - not because the box or literally anyone told me to do that - it just felt right.

with the meatballs in the oven, it was time for me to make my “it gets the job done” sauce. i threw another ¼ chopped white onion and some minced garlic into a saucepan with oil and, once the onion was browning, i poured in a whole can of what i thought was crushed tomatoes but NO it was a can of cherry tomatoes.

this was the first time i put my head in my hands. this wasn’t a disaster, though, because i figured i could just throw it in a blender when it was done cooking. upon releasing my head from my large hands’ grasp, back in went my head when i realized that i forgot to use an egg replacer and vegan parmesan in the meatballs.

a dramatized reenactment:

it’s just food, though, and i was the only one who was going to eat it. after 20 minutes in the oven, with 2 times using tongs to move the meatballs around, they were ready and they looked exactly how you would expect them to: cursed, but edible looking. it’s a good thing i didn’t opt to fry them up, they would have crumbled to dust without that faux egg as a binder.

back to my sauce: i added the dry basil and green pepper cholula from the above “spices of the round-stained table” and then threw some gluten free spaghetti in a pot to boil. i am not on a gluten free diet, it’s just that (as you can tell from the canned tomato incident) my brain refuses to read the packaging of things i buy. this ineptitude, given my allergies, will probably kill me.

live laugh anaphylaxis!

when the spaghetti had a minute left to go, i drained it and saved about a quarter cup of the pasta water. i then put it back in the pot with the saved water and a bunch of sauce on heat so it can emulsify. oh, and before that, i had blended the sauce to smooth out the cherry tomato skins:

when plated altogether, it looked like regular not-cursed spaghetti and meatballs! it was all actually really good and, perhaps, worth the strife.

here’s a broken meatball zoomed in for texture:

i could have chopped the shishito peppers better, but honestly i could have done a lot of things better during this absolute clown show.

i am eating the leftovers as i write this, and the fake meatballs reheated pretty well! i’ve only paused editing this twice (two (2) times) to put my head in my hands. if i had a chance to do this again (i mean, i do - i only used half the meat), i would probably change everything!

i think i’m going to use the rest of the meat to make stuffed bell peppers. one way to help me try to lift the curse so those come out way better is to donate to the women's prison association. wpa advocates for alternatives to incarceration and supports women in all stages of the criminal “justice” system in nyc. i’ve been on their junior board for a couple of years, now, and am proud to bring awareness and your money to this cause and important work. live laugh love y’all!

xoxo jenn