Quinoa Walnut Vegetarian Meatballs

Vegetarian meatballs made with quinoa and walnuts. It’s what’s for dinner.

This is a recipe I first made years ago when I was just getting into cooking with no meat. It started with throwing a bunch of stuff in a food processor. It’s actually still kind of the same, but perfected a bit.

Now I know that with things like Beyond beef and Impossible burgers, vegetarian meatballs don’t need to be quite so vegetarian. But this recipe is actually pretty tasty, and full of nutritious things as well. They’re probably not going to fool any meat eaters into thinking that they are eating beef or anything. But they are pretty tasty with some pasta and marinara.

You’ll need a food processor for this. I mean, sure, you can probably chop everything if you want, but the walnuts need to one almost paste like in order for this to come together well enough to hold up. A food processor makes it pretty easy — just pulse the walnuts and parsley, add to a bowl with some quinoa and seasoning ingredients, and form into meatballs. You’ll bake these until they’re good and browned — don’t skimp here, you want them to be. nice and toasty.

I made a quick marinara for these. It’s a recipe that’s been making the rounds for a while — San Marzano tomatoes, butter, onion. I add olive oil because it makes the sauce rich and jammy, but it’s really simple, doesn’t take long, and is tasty on a busy night.

I would normally serve this with spaghetti or angel hair, but I had linguine. Penne would work fine too I suppose. Anything that you would eat with meatballs will work here.

If you wanted to serve this with garlic bread, that wouldn’t be a bad idea. Maybe a glass of red wine. It may not be grandma’s spaghetti and meatballs, but I promise you it will be good enough that you’ll want to make it again.