Whole-Wheat Spaghetti and Meatballs

Recipe: Whole-Wheat Spaghetti and Meatballs

Source: 100 Days of Real Food

Time: 30 minutes 

Ease: 4* 

Taste: -1

Leftover Value: So horrible that the leftovers were tossed.

Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Down the Drain!

*Required more steps that my usual meatballs

I should have had this recipe figured out at "whole-wheat".  Yet still I decided to make it.

After telling myself again and again that I'm going to get back on track with eating healthier and working out more, I finally had enough.  

I discovered* the blog, 100 Days of Real Food, and was intrigued.  

*This is not ordinarily my type of blog to follow.  I love butter.  I love white flour.  I hate whole-wheat and I hate making limitations on what I eat.  One of my Facebook friends must have liked this page thus bringing it into my feed and drawing my attention to it at a time when I was most vulnerable to wanting to eat healthy.  Darn you, Facebook!

Essentially, the blogger and her family have eliminated highly processed foods from their diet.  That sounds like a good thing, right?  While that is something I'm attempting to do as well, they take it further than highly processed foods such as Oreos and Snickers bars.  They do not eat anything made with white flour or white rice. and only use natural sweeteners (so no white sugar).*

I'm sorry, the thought of that makes me die inside a little.

*I realize these items are processed, however, what the blogger even states in her book is that almost everything we eat is "processed" in some way.  The point is eliminating items that have either absolutely no nutritional value or items that have added ingredients that are not actually food.

There are some aspects of their focus that I agree with and hope to bring into my own eating habits, but some seem a little over the top.

Such as whole-wheat meatballs.

I don't even have an excuse as to why I thought these would be better than the already delicious meatballs that I currently make.*  I'm easily swayed into believing that something is delicious simply because someone else says it is.  I should have known better when I saw carrot bits and soy sauce in the ingredient list.

*These are meatballs that are bite-sized, not overly breaded, tender, filled with the flavors of Italy, and cause people to drop what they are doing and come over to my home when they hear that they're being served for dinner.  I think I need to post them soon.

I went one step better than the recipe and didn't even serve the meatballs with whole-wheat noodles.  I served them with spaghetti squash instead.  I figured I had the healthiest meatball possible and I would cut down on calories with the squash.

The squash was the only thing Hubby and I ended up eating that night.  The meatballs were that bad.  I used 90% lean ground beef, which is what I usually use in my meatballs.  The flavor was so horrible that the meat didn't taste like ground beef (and no, the meat had not gone bad).  Worse than the flavor of the meatballs was the texture.  Rather than a crumbly meaty bite, the meatballs were chewy.

Chewy meatballs?  I mean, chewy meatballs!  It was like having a meat flavored bouncy ball in my mouth.  I wasn't sure what sorcery had caused this to happen.  Ordinarily I will eat through a horrible meal until I've at least eaten half of what I put on my plate.  With these I couldn't bare to eat more than three quarters of one meatball.

These meatballs had me so upset I almost didn't blog about them.  With new recipes (that I expect to enjoy) I've recently taken to making them the first time without taking any pictures.  My intent is be able to enjoy to process of making them.  Then the next time I can photograph the steps along the way and blog later about the deliciousness.  When I discovered how horrible these were, I snapped a few pictures knowing that I would never, ever make them again.

There is, however, a small glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.  I made a delicious homemade sauce to go with the meatballs from my old man crush Stanley Tucci's cookbook.  I also tried out a few other recipes from 100 Days of Real Food and found the results to be far better than the meatballs.  So there is hope.