Turkey Meatballs in Pumpkin Sauce

This meal took me back to my childhood, and not in a good way.

My mother was a member of [brand-name diet club] off and on throughout the 1980s and 1990s. One of the results was two unshakable beliefs: 1) ground turkey is “healthier” than ground beef, and 2) no one can taste the difference if you put it in a ground-beef recipe. Naturally, the fresh 80% lean ground beef from the Fareway butcher counter had more fat than the 85% lean ground turkey sold in chubs in the freezer section, but as we now know, “low-fat” doesn’t mean “healthy“. The ground turkey also had less iron, which is important for the health of women and teenage girls, but apparently not as important as weighing in with your friends in a church basement.

And the sad half-teaspoon of chili powder in the tomato-bean-meat “chili soup” could not disguise the rotting-roadkill smell and flavor of the ground turkey sold in chubs in the freezer section. Every fat-free-cream-of-soup casserole, every taco salad, and every cheeseless grilled turkey burger was torture to choke down. Roast turkey, and turkey legs, and smoked turkey were all enjoyable, but something in the processing of ground turkey made it nasty.

I avoided it for decades.

Then I was lured in by the siren song of “turkey meatballs in pumpkin sauce” via Pinterest. I like pumpkin. I like meatballs. This should be a match made in heaven. Plus, I live on the other side of the planet now, in a new century, with different laws governing agriculture and food production–surely it will be fine.

I needed a couple of weeks to source some ground turkey. Like the ground chicken sold here, it came pre-seasoned with a “spice extract” and some beet powder for a more appealing color. That’s fine, I rationalized, the pumpkin sauce will cover that. I made a special trip out to a specific grocery store to buy it. Two pounds/900g.

What the pumpkin sauce couldn’t cover was the rotting-roadkill smell. As soon as I opened the packages I started gagging. Ground turkey here and now is EXACTLY THE SAME AS I REMEMBERED IT. And it’s AWFUL.

I kept going. I can admit I have made a terrible mistake, but I can’t waste 12 Euros worth of fresh meat.

Back to meatballs: this is another recipe where the milk/egg/breadcrumbs are mixed together separately before being added to the ground meat. I am starting to really appreciate this method as a way to ensure there aren’t any clumps of bread in the final product.

I cooked them through in my big pan so I could *sob* use the crusty Maillard reaction bits in the sauce. The stench persisted.

And now we come to the saving grace of this meal: the pumpkin sauce. This sauce was brilliant; I am keeping the sauce recipe to make next season with some good meatballs from real meat, or maybe some roast turkey breast. It’s got all my favorite things: parmesan, cream, maple syrup, and pumpkin. Three cups of pumpkin, from my freezer. So much more pumpkin than cream that I do not hesitate to label this sauce “healthy, if you define healthy as low-fat.”

My second mistake was serving these meatballs with Serviettenknödel. I love them, but they didn’t absorb the vegetable sauce the way they do a cream sauce. And this sauce deserves to be stirred into a mountain of mashed potatoes with extra butter.

Usually my food smells better than it looks. This time, it’s the opposite. I couldn’t even enjoy my new porcelain meatball-blogging bowls while I choked it down.

And–two pounds of meat!–I was stuck eating these three nights in a row. So many bad childhood memories.

I threw away the page with the meatball recipe and kept the page with the sauce recipe. Watch this space.