Oh Neptune.

So lyk whats the deal with a whole song being written about a meatball? You know the one–“On top of spaghetti, all covered in cheese…”–essentially someone sneezes, and the meatball rolls off of this mound of spaghetti and out the door. It’s gone/lost forever/not forgotten/memorialized in song. We’re all for a song being written about pasta. We’re all for a song being written about cheese. But one singular meatball? Hmm. Not impressed.

How we feel about this song

[Lynn’s note: Something I realized in my research to find that particular .gif was that meatballs are kind of iconic in pop culture. They come up again and again–there are a lot of really freaky parts of the internet devoted to armed and legged meatballs walking around places. Look it up.]

If we had to write a song about a meatball, though, it would be a quinoa meatball, like the ones we made last night to deliciously top of our own spaghetti.

YUM CITY

If you’re thinking “Hey girl, where’s the meatball?” please direct your attention down and to the left, and open up your mind to wider conditions under which you might describe a “ball” shape. See it? Yeah. That’s it. Let us explain: If you’ll recall from Lynn’s Diary Entry the other day, this recipe was pretty made-up. Free-balled, if you will. Brynne was about to return home from her WILD family VAYCAY, and Lynn thought–we need something romantic, yet vegetarian, yet hearty, yet able to incorporate leftovers. Thus the idea was born: quinoa meatballs crafted from the quinoa/black bean/corn/tomato/mozz cheese filling from Lynn’s solo stuffed pepper!

A note from Lynn: My dad cooks meatballs (IRL meatballs) by placing them in a giant vat of homemade sauce for like 6 hours because a Guido (in the feminist sense), and I think that that is the way to do it, so I started off by attempting to craft my own pasta sauce loosely based on this recipe. Only thing was, we didn’t have a can of crushed tomatoes #galswithoutcannedgoods, so I decided to use a tub of grape tomatoes from our #BOGO deal a while back. The thing is that you’re supposed to *skin* tomatoes before you make them into sauce, but I thought NAH!

The tomat sauce shrouded in steam

So the sauce was pretty thick–it was essentially all onions and tomato chunks. Not ideal for cookin’ meatballs, even if they are made of quinoa. So here’s the save: I took a can of generic “tomato sauce” and put it in it’s own pot to heat up. That’s when my attn turned to the meatball-making. In true Felix Freeballing, I decided to make the filling into balls by mixing it with 1 egg and some pasta-y spices, like rosemary, oregano, sage, and cinnamon (that one wasn’t very pasta-y, but that’s something that goes into meatballs). If your name is Maya, please let us know whether you think any of these spices are good ones to bring to Europe. Mixing these things together made a pretty sticky, solid masterpiece, which I rolled into ballz and then plopped in the pan with the sauce.

This is what it looked like (above).

Things were going pretty well at this point! So I thought, let’s shake it up a bit! And dumped the OG sauce (you remember) on top of this new pot that contained the quinoa balls. Then, to mix it all up, I moved the whole shebang into one big pot–and this is the part where the quinoa balls started breaking up a bit. It was not quite a TSwift level break up, but it was a Lynn writes a song on her ukulele about someone she never dated level break up. I should’ve used a bigger pot.

At this point, Brynne ARRIVES HOME AND STICKS HER CUTE LITTLE FACE IN THE KITCHEN AND WE REUNITE AND ARE HAPPY!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

WHY IS SHE READING WHEN SHE COULD BE TALKING TO ME????

So we plop the now meat-y (veggie, of course) sauce and some meatballs on top of a thin whole wheat spaghetti (not for nothing, but whole wheat spaghetti is SO MUCH better than REG because it has a flavor! The impromptu combo was actually really good and I can’t wait to eat it for the rest of the week.

Serve it up hot, bitches!