Happy birthday, LeeLee!
We’ve been celebrating for the last few days, juggling three (!) holiday parties and one (!) Heisman ceremony (on TV, not in person, but the result was well worth it), but today is LeeLee’s actual birthday, and he specifically requested spaghetti and vegetarian meatballs to headline our dinner menu. Flattery will get you everywhere in this life, so naturally I added his request to our weekly menu plan.
I pulled out a jar of homemade spaghetti sauce – canned this summer, you may recall – and began to heat it up while I cooked the spaghetti and formed some slices of Lightlife vegetarian beef (the kind from the tube) into meatballs. I coated a large skillet with a little bit of oil, turned the heat to Medium, and placed the meatballs in, turning them every couple of minutes so they could brown evenly on all sides.
By the time the pasta was cooked and drained, the meatballs were ready and the tomato sauce was smelling just great. So on our plates it all went, one layer after another! Paired with some garlic bread and a glass of wine, it was a great celebratory meal for a most celebratory guy.
In a few minutes, we’ll have dessert – a pannetone one of my friends gave me in a Secret Santa exchange. We’ve been saving it for this occasion all weekend – a perfect end to a great birthday!
:)