The Jolly Fox
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Cloudy. With A Chance Of Turkish Meatballs.
Yesterday it was awesomely rainy here in Los Angeles. Due to our very special mediterranean climate, we have warm to hot and typically very dry summers and winter is when we get our rain. Of course, weather isn’t entirely predictable, so we do have some rainy overlap into fall or spring certain years….and we do get the very occasional summer sprinkle or scattered shower. Weather is actually really cool. Whenever you hear weather people on the news talking about highs and lows, they’re referring to air pressure systems. When you have a low pressure system, the air is rising and you can expect cloudy/stormy weather. High pressure is exactly the opposite and in areas of high pressure, you can expect it to be a clear day. Changes in pressure gradient is what causes wind. I could go on about how clouds are formed and how it is that rain falls, but then I would never get to talk about what I really want to….meatballs. Or vegan meatballs, rather.
Yesterday, I decided to make the Vegan Turkish Pomegranate Meatball Soup from one of my favorite cookbooks, Veganize This! by Jenn Shagrin. I didn’t intend to make this soup on a rainy day, so the fact that it was cloudy with a chance of meatballs was entirely serendipitous. What I didn’t realize was that making this soup would turn into a 4 hr meal. If you have Jenn’s book and intend to make this soup one day, I suggest you prep for a day or two ahead of time, as this soup is a handful. I don’t mean to say anything negative about Jenn or her recipes, because I adore her and her food, but just warning everyone that this particular recipe is very time consuming if you choose to do it all at once.
When all was said and done though, the soup was very good and I do have significant amount of soup and meatballs to eat whenever I want for the next few days.
Again the soup was rather tasty, so I don’t mind that it sort of took forever. If I make it again, I will prep the seitan meatballs and all of the veggies beforehand. Actually, making the seitan and then forming that into the meatballs the day before would save a tremendous amount of time. I’d say the meatballs were more reminiscent of falafel even though they had no chickpeas. They were still super good though and def. worth making at some point.
I have made vegan meatballs twice before, the beanballs from Veganomicon and the Swedish Meatballs from The Vegan Table. I have to say that the Swedish meatballs were the most like real meatballs, albeit Swedish rather than Italian. The reason is that Colleen’s recipe uses Lightlife’s Gimme Lean Ground Beef, which is very meat-like. The beanballs were good too and worked well for a meatball beanball sub. I probably prefer the beanballs to eat regularly, as they are the least processed and most healthy out of the three, but the others certainly make good treats and creative meals, so give them a chance too.
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