Today's Roasting Experiment

Today's attempt to clean up the fridge reinforced my premise that you can't go wrong with roasted vegetables. I cut up plum tomatoes that were starting to look tired, some red peppers, a green pepper and part of a zuchinni (the rest was definitely too tired). I also added an onion. Everything was cut in chunks. Then I sprinkled garlic powder (because I ran out of garlic cloves), basil, oregano, and rosemary and drizzled olive oil over all. It roasted in a 400 degree oven for about 40 minutes. I reached in a couple of times and gave it a stir. (Also, I lined the pan with foil - easy on the dishwasher [aka-yours truly]).

Meanwhile, I put 2 jars of plain spaghetti sauce that we had received in a gift basket into the slow cooker. When the veggies were done I dumped them in, juices and all, and let it warm up and bubble for a few hours.

The final touch was some low carb meatballs. I adapted this recipe from one I found on line:

2 lbs ground beef
2 beaten eggs
3/4 cups parmesan cheese
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp onion powder

Mix all of the above together and roll into golf ball sized balls. Place on a baking sheet (use foil for easy clean-up) and bake at 375 degrees for 25 minutes.

I put 12 meatballs into the sauce and put the rest into the freezer for future use.

Some cooking show I watched recently said to work the ground beef gently and not squash it together, so I stirred it with a fork and used a light touch on rolling the balls. I thought they came out good - not too hard or dense.

I had a box of Dreamfields Rotini in the cupboard, so that's what we enjoyed the sauce on. Little Man's Father liked it and so did I!