Enjoy Cooking on the Fly? Spaghetti and Meatballs, Impossible to Mess Up

I love food, but I don't enjoy baking and cooking the way some people do. I think it boils down to the fact that I dislike following a recipe. If I don't have everything a recipe calls for, I would rather try and substitute the missing ingredient with something I already have than make a trip to the grocery store — even when the missing ingredient is butter.

I recently baked chocolate chip cookies. I had a craving for them and had all the ingredients, except butter. But who needs butter? It's fattening and can cost up to $4.97 for one stick. I also think that most recipes call for more butter than is really needed. 

So I went ahead and started making cookie dough. I mixed together flour, sugar, eggs, and fat-free sour cream in place of butter. I followed the rest of the recipe and then rolled my dough into cute little balls, placed them neatly on a baking sheet, and popped them in the oven.

Did my cookies turn out? Not really. They weren't horrible but they didn't flatten out like cookies are supposed to and they tasted pretty bland. I decided to look into the reasons why they turned out this way, besides the obvious. 

What I found out is that sour cream actually can be successfully used to substitute butter in certain recipes. In cookie recipes, sour cream can be used to substitute some of the butter called for, although fat-free sour cream is not recommended.

Cooking allows much more flexibility than baking when it comes to substituting ingredients and making up a recipe as you go. After a long day, the last thing I want to do is cook an extravagant dinner following a recipe. I prefer to cook when inspiration strikes and following my own rules.

Spaghetti and meatballs is one meal that is a pretty safe bet to cook on the fly. Adding fresh vegetables and spices to your sauce and making meatballs from scratch can make it a bit more interesting, but it's still nearly impossible to mess up. If you like pasta, it's the perfect weekday evening meal and tomorrow's lunch is already made!

Cherry tomatoes and white mushrooms.

Toss tomatoes, mushrooms, and salt and pepper in a pan with a little canola oil.

Pasta from scratch would be delicious, but let's be honest — I'm in CreComm!

I'm pretty generous with my pasta sauce. No measuring cups here!

Since lean ground turkey contains less fat than lean ground beef, I use it in place of beef whenever I can. Here I added one egg, bread crumbs, Montreal Steak Spice, and a spoonful of barbecue sauce to ground turkey to make the meatballs.  

Roll the turkey into little balls with your hands and place them in a lightly greased pan.

Get the pasta going! I like whole-wheat spaghetti.

Meatballs are ready! 

Spoon spaghetti, meatballs, and sauce onto a plate. Dinner is served!