11 August - meatballs and spaghetti

I had a colleague round for dinner this evening, for meatballs and spaghetti. It's a recipe I found in a WFI magazine a couple of years ago and it always goes down really well - it creates great smells and tastes good too, but without being too fancy.

For the sauce:

• Put a tin of tomatoes, a small chopped onion, a couple of garlic cloves, a splash of olive oil and some torn up basil in a saucepan. Bubble away for as long as possible (an hour if you can), cool, then liquidise.

For the meatballs:

• Mix together about 200g beef mince, 50g fresh breadcrumbs, 40g grated parmesan, some chopped garlic, parsley, a handful of pine nuts and an egg. Shape the mixture into balls - I did 8 from these quantities, so four each.
• Fry the meatballs in olive oil for about ten mins, then plop them into the tomato sauce to finish cooking for another 15-20 mins, along with some more fresh basil if you want and a spoon of the frying oil (this really adds to the flavour!), while you cook the spaghetti.

It's not the most elegant of dishes, but it went down well over an evening of chat. No photos because I was being sociable rather than putting a plate by the window in search of natural light!!