Easy Pasta and Meatballs

The other day I was trying to figure out what kind of food I was in the mood for…I took out a pound of ground turkey that morning with no real plan in mind.  Quite honestly, I wasn’t excited about anything I could think of to make with it.  Then it hit me that pasta and meatballs was EXACTLY what I wanted.  The only problem was I was feeling much too lazy to go through all my usual steps in making meatballs.  Typically I make them and brown them on all sides in a pan and then cook them the rest of the way in the sauce. That just seemed like way too much work.  So I figured, why couldn’t I just make them in a muffin tin? They probably would’t get as brown and crispy on the outside…but that was a risk my lazy self was willing to take!

I preheated my oven to 350 degrees and then I mixed my pound of ground turkey with oatmeal, an egg,frozen pre-chopped onions (great hack! keep these in your freezer and add to dishes when you don’t feel like cutting up a whole onion),  Worcestershire sauce, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, and italian seasonings.  Then I rolled them into balls and plopped them into a muffin tin, sprayed with coconut oil.

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Chicken, Broccoli, and Mushroom Pesto

So I have this thing for pesto…it’s a huge thing actually.  The flavor is just so satisfying to me! I ended up making a sandwich for lunch yesterday and it was kind of a kitchen sink project.  I had some veggie burger patties in the freezer, some lettuce, some avocado…and then I realized I needed some kind of sauce to put on it so it’d have a little flavor and not be too dry.  Typically when I have this problem I just use hummus, but I spotted a jar of pesto in my fridge and thought YES.  So after I ate that for lunch, of course my brain was like yeah…we’re gonna need infinitely more pesto ASAP.  Hence this dinner was born!

I’ve made this dish several different ways depending on what I have in my fridge that I can throw into it.  There have been times where I really wanted to make this but the only veggie I had on hand was frozen green beans and I used those…it was still good! If there’s a will, there’s a way…and there’s always a will for pesto.

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