New Year’s Eve dinner is a tricky beast. There’s the fact we’ve all been eating Christmas food for almost a month, so all those cranberry, stuffing and oily potato flavours are kinda finito. What’s more, day drinking plus chocolate coins for breakfast and cheese boards with every meal mean whatever you planned to wear for NYE will probably be on the tighter side. A bloating curry, burger and chips or pizza ain’t gonna help matters.
Thankfully you and your friends will hopefully be a bit better at adulting than Skins circa 2007, and realise that sitting down to a meal before heading out for the biggest-one-of-the-all-the-big-ones is a good idea.
Our take on meatball marinara needs a bit of love to prepare the main oven-baked dish, but the rest is just a few accompaniments and a quick homemadevegan cheese. I’d recommend preparing the meatballs and the cashew cheese a few hours ahead, ready to bake and reheat for when your guests start to arrive. Then all you need to do is get yourself sorted before heading back into the kitchen to make the pesto and avocado cream. It’s the kind of meal that leaves the portion sizes to your guests, which is ideal for no-pressure/ drop-by parties where some people have already eaten or may be on their way to another dinner later.
Cook up this hot mess of dishes, get them all out on the table, and then just ask your friends to bring the extras. Sub bread rolls and oven french fries are easy to pick up en route, and then stick in the oven and under the grill once they arrive. Serve with toasted sub rolls, then let everyone construct their own meatball sandwiches, topped with avocado cream and pesto. You can ad-lib with toppings too: I think sweet peppers, chopped gherkins and crispy onions would also work really well.
Oh- and in case you needed another excuse to make this: If you’re planning to go vegan on 1st January, leave anything you don’t eat in the fridge and you’ll already have your lunch ready for you the next day. The meatballs are also really easy to make gluten free, just use gluten free breadcrumbs and gluten free flour, and serve with brown rice instead of bread rolls.
What to ask your mates to bring
Oven french fries (sorry not sorry, you’ve got nails to paint, hem lines to shorten and playlists to curate)
Gherkins
Sub bread rolls for toasting
Sweet peppers for extra toppings
Sweet potato and spinach meatball marinara
Makes four portions
Cup measurements are used so you don’t need to weigh everything out. Just pick a medium-sized drinking glass or small mug to use and everything will be proportionate.
Ingredients
1 cups soy mince (If you’re making this for vegans, Quorn isn’t vegan, but lots of supermarket own-brand soy minces are)
2 sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped into large chunks
1 onion, chopped small
1 medium carrot, chopped small
¼ cup panko crumbs or breadcrumbs
1 tsp red chilli flakes
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp rosemary
1 tsp lemon juice
2 tsp egg replacer mix (found in Holland and Barrett or larger supermarkets in the free-from section)
3 tbsp water
Sunflower oil for frying
½ cup plain flour
One carton of passata or plain tomato pasta sauce and a bunch of basil for the marinara.
What to do
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Boil the sweet potatoes in salted water, and once cooked through, drain and mash.
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In a large mixing bowl, tip in the sweet potato mash with the soy mince, onion, carrot, panko or breadcrumbs, chilli flakes, garlic powder, rosemary and lemon juice, and mix through. Prepare the egg replacer by whisking together the dry egg replacer mix with 3 tbsp water. Now add in the egg replacer mix and combine. It should be a consistency that’s a little sticky and malleable but not wet or falling-apart-dry.
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Heat a large, flat-based frying pan with sunflower oil, and begin to form a few meatballs. Roll up the equivalent or 2 or 3 tsp of mixture into a ball, and then dip in a bowl of plain flour, just to lightly cover the meatball. Drop a small bit of mixture into the frying pan to see if it fizzes- if it does, the oil is hot enough. Carefully add in the meatballs a few at a time. They need about 2-3 minutes on each side, and need to cook all the way through, instead of flash-frying on the outside.
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Once the meatballs are ready, put on a plate with some kitchen roll to soak off the excess oil. Continue to roll up the meatballs and add the finished one to the kitchen roll plate.
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When all the mix is cooked up, arrange the meatballs aside in an oven-proof dish and pour over the tomato passata sauce. Set aside until you’re ready to top with cashew cheese and bake.
Cashew cheese
Makes enough to top on the marinara meatballs and for serving
N.B: If you don’t have a high-powered jug-blender, but you have a friend coming who does, ask them to make this part of the meal, as it will work a lot better when the whole mixture can get really smooth.
Ingredients
¼ cup raw, plain cashews
1 cup hot water
2 tbsp and 2 tsp of tapioca starch or tapioca flour
1 tbsp nutritional yeast
1 tsp lemon juice
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp garlic powder
What to do
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Soak the cashew nuts for between four hours or overnight. You can also boil them for 10 minutes if you’re really in a rush- but ideally, yanno, just get these on the soak the minute you’re back from your food shopping and it probably will be four hours before you need them.
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Drain the cashew nuts and add them into the blender with the hot water, along with the tapioca, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, salt and garlic powder. Blend for about four-five minutes until it’s really smooth.
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If you can still see grains in the mix, pour the cheese through a sieve and discard the cashew pieces- you don’t want them getting in the way of the cheesy texture. Heat the remaining mixture in a small sauce pan over medium high heat, stirring all the time. It might take a few minutes but it will begin to go a little gooey and lumpy, and then within another minute or so, you’ll have what looks like a really thick roux or cheese sauce.
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Heat for another two minutes to make sure it is properly firmed up, then set aside ready for assembling.
To assemble the oven-baked meatball marinara: Grab your oven-proof dish of meatballs and marinara sauce and dollop little bits of the cashew cheese on top, interspersed with basil leaves. Drizzle with olive oil and bake at about 200°C for fifteen to twenty minutes, until the cheese has gone crispy and the sauce is bubbling.
Avocado cream
Avocados are the ideal natural fat to soak up alcohol and stand you in good stead for the rest of the night, so add this avocado cream dressing on anything you fancy.
Ingredients
1 avocado
100ml soy or oat cream
Juice of ½ lemon
Salt and pepper
Blend all ingredients until creamy and store in fridge until ready to serve.
Basil and spinach pesto
Perfect for adding some extra colour and goodness to your NYE.
Ingredients
All the remaining basil leaves that you didn’t put on the meatball marinara
About 2 handfuls of washed spinach
Olive oil
Sea salt and pepper
Lemon juice
Blend the basil leaves, spinach and olive oil in a food processor. Taste, and season with salt, pepper and lemon juice until it’s just right. Store in the fridge until serving.
Like this? Then you might also be interested in:
The Lunch You Can Make To Eat All Week When All Your Pots And Pans Are Dirty
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.