Thank you so much for responding to our last email and post in various ways! We are taking all of your comments to heart and some of it to the stove – some of you will find dishes on the menu you wanted to have again.
Your input also played a role in our new dish this week: Spaghetti with Neatballs. This one was interesting to put together. We have had it on our radar for a while, and when someone mentioned wanting “real” pasta we knew it was time! We did choose whole-grain spaghetti.
We tried the “meatballs” ourselves and loved them, made a garlicky sauce to complement them, we chose steamed broccoli as the veggie in this dish, because it is harvested locally in Arizona right now.
This dish is also oil-free, or more exactly said free of added oils. The sunflower seeds in the neatballs contain oil. We planning on making more dishes without the use of oils by water sauteing our mirepoix, the basic flavor component of many dishes. This seems to be a good new direction to expand into as all of us want to do more and more for our health.
For those of you who want to stay away from wheat pasta, we are offering just the neatballs in the sauce so you can make your own pasta. The neatballs held up well in the sauce when we kept them in a jar with the sauce. Our concern had been that they would get too soft over a few days, but that was not the case.
Speaking about how well dishes keep, of course, cooked pasta dries out over time. Here is how to rehydrate it when heating. Slide the whole dish in a ceramic or non-stick pan so that the different ingredients stay nicely separated for aesthetic purposes, then sprinkle the spaghetti with a little water to rehydrate them, cover with a tight-fitting lid and use low heat to prevent burning at the bottom. The water on the spaghetti will be absorbed by the pasta as it gets hot. (This is, by the way, a general preferred reheating technique. No oil is needed, only some water, depending on the density of the dish. It creates a little steam that is then absorbed and helps the heating process. A tight-fitting lid and low heat are important).
Alternately you could use the sauce to rehydrate the pasta by mixing pasta and sauce. This is maybe not as nice visually, but you may not mind. And did you know you can throw cooked spaghetti in boiling water for a second and it will be perfectly rehydrated and hot? Of course, if you go through the trouble of heating water in an extra pan you might as well cook your own pasta fresh.
We hope these little reheating tips were useful and you also enjoyed hearing our reasoning behind our choices in composing the new dish.
We look forward to hearing from you