Cooking with Dr. Monkey

Today's episode:
Or turkey meatballs with pasta.
I started by sauteing one third of an onion, some yellow bell pepper, and some baby portabella mushrooms. While the vegetables sauteed, I put half a pack of 99% fat free ground turkey in a mixing bowl and to that I added a half cup of bread crumbs and one egg. (A word about ground turkey: if you are using ground turkey to cut down on fat then make sure you get 95% or 99% fat free turkey. If you use the 85% fat free turkey then you're getting as much, if not more, fat as you would in some packages of ground beef.) I mixed the ground turkey, the bread crumbs, and the egg all together and when the onions, peppers, and mushrooms got done I mixed them in as well. Next I rolled the mixture into medium size balls and I put them in the frying pan, which I had put on medium heat.Resist the urge to turn them too quickly because you want them to get brown on the outside most all the way around.
After they browned on one side sufficiently, I put in a quarter cup of red wine, in this case it was a pinot noir from California. The wine deglazes the pan and it unsticks any meatball that might have been stuck. I turned all the meatballs over and I then put on my pasta water. I covered the meatballs and I let them simmer and cook.
After the meatballs cooked a bit more I added half a jar of red sauce to the pan. I like to use Newman's Own because I like the flavor and I like it that they give 100% percent of after tax profits to charity, mostly to charities that help sick kids. I also diced up a half of a small zucchini and I put it in with the meat balls as they cooked in the sauce.
I served the meatballs in red sauce (three meatballs each) on pasta with a small salad and some French bread that we had gotten from Scratch Bakery here in Johnson City. It was all mighty tasty.