Meatballs in tomato sauce

[turlough]

Today I made another Nigella recipe, this time from the Swedish translation of Nigella Bites. I'm not including it here since you can find the English original on her site: Meatballs.

Changes: I had a 500g packet of minced beef in the freezer so used that instead of a pork & beef mix. (I might go with the recommended mix next time though. My meatballs turned out a little on the dry side.) Instead of parmesan I used emmenthal but doubled the amount. Since I'm a bit sensitive to the acidity of tomato-based recipes I used cream instead of milk in the sauce and ended up adding more of it at the end.

Verdict: When I tasted it at the end of cooking I was a bit dubious if it had been worth the effort. It still tasted to sharp and acidic to me. With the addition of pasta - glutenfree fusilli in my case - however the taste bloomed and turned round and rich. So almost certainly doing this again!

Smitten Kitchen's (Banana) Spice Cake

[highlyeccentric]

This is on my 'fine, but probably won't make again' list - at least, not using bananas. It's a bit fiddlier than the last couple of banana cake recipes I've used, to no discernible benefit. I might try one of the other flavour variants, though.

Also since my last post I've made Jack Monroe's 'Tomato and Olive Scuffins', which purported to be vegan scones, which Jack says taste better with a looser batter so the recipe uses muffin cups. Great, thought I: this will be easier to gluten-free-ify, because no kneading! Well, maybe vegan scone-muffins taste okay, but they definitely do not when gluten-free-ified. (Part of the problem was a common one I've had with savoury GF muffins: leathery, indelibly stuck to the muffin paper. Sweet muffins mostly evade this.)

Smitten Kitchen's Spice Cake
From Smitten Kitchen Everyday; I'm only giving metric measurements here

( What you need and what you do with it )