Sometimes you gotta take a break from the hard-core carnivordom, and these are the way to go—just ask our staff, who eat them around the clock. These balls happen to be Mike's favorite too. You'll often find us at the bar with a big bowl, topped with Classic Tomato Sauce or Spinach Basil Pesto and a side of steamed or sautéed spinach. And when it comes to kids, this is a great and tasty way to sneak in more veggies.

This is modified from Louise Hagler’s Tofu Cookery. It was the recipe that my family and I started cooking together over 20 years ago.

My palate has a great memory. If it’s something like my mom’s birthday or paying rent I’m guaranteed to forget, but a slice of pizza I had during the Clinton administration will linger forever. And so it is with Spaghetti-os and our sordid history. Children, cover your eyes, this recipe will reveal quite a few things:

I don’t mind a couple of short cut ingredients when they get the job done.
I’m not above ordering food on the internet.
I was a juvenile delinquent.
I should have a job at the national vegan council for naming things.

As a 14 year old goth in the age before cellphones, my friends and I would do that thing of staying up all night being idiots, hanging out on the beach or at the park or whatever (I swear it was mostly innocent.) Since we told our moms we were sleeping at each other’s houses, we couldn’t really go home until it was light out. So we’d go the corner store and pop a couple of Spaghetti-O cans for breakfast, thanks to that easy pull-off lid. We’d pretty much sit on the street, black eyeliner streaming down our faces, ripped fishnets ripping even more, getting Spaghetti-o sauce all over our Salvation Army velvet dresses while we waited for the sun to rise. And, seriously, for shame, those Spaghetti-Os were good.

Sort of mushy rings of pasta swimming in a sweet, cheesy sauce tomato sauce. And don’t forget the meatballs! Chewy orbs that made you want to keep biting into them, even though you didn’t exactly know why – it could have been voodoo or MSG. I had two basic strategies for extending their little meatball lives – slicing them in half or saving them for the end. You totally won if your last bite was a meatball.

Well, sometimes my palate hits me with a strange craving, and I don’t know if Sisters Of Mercy popped up on VH1 classics or what, but I had a nagging for vegan Spaghetti-os. The first order of business was to see if the O-shaped pasta could be found, which brought me to the Wikipedia list of pastas and eventually to Amazon where I purchased three bags of Anellini.

I thought that the meatballs would work well with either tempeh or lentils (of course I had to ask Twitter first), but since I was out of tempeh, that answered that. And because I wanted mushy, but not TOO mushy, I added a little bit of vital wheat gluten. To make them addictive, some seasoned breadcrumbs and, since it’s like catnip for vegans, a touch of nutritional yeast.

The sauce was made velvety and cheesy with some cashews and nutritional yeast, but not too much. Instead of high fructose corn syrup, a bit of brown sugar caramelized with the onions gives the sauce a satisfying sweetness and cuts the bitterness of canned tomatoes. I also used crushed tomatoes with basil, for another dimension of sweetness.

The end result hit all the right notes for me. The lentils ended up being the perfect choice for the chewy texture I wanted and their naturally meaty made for excellent meatballs. I really think kids of all ages will dig this. What kid won’t want to eat something called Spaghetti-Nos? And not to toot my own horn or anything, but I’m pretty sure they taste better than their inspiration. Maybe I didn’t run outside and sit on the sidewalk to eat them, but I did wear a lot of black eyeshadow that evening. Coincidence?

Meatballs in an Italian context are almost always associated with tomato sauce, and rightly so; it's a delicious combination. But if you ask Mario Batali, that's not the only way to serve them. Flipping through his Molto Italiano cookbook the other day, I came across this recipe for meatballs filled with ricotta cheese, pistachios, and Parmesan (and they are as creamy and sublime as they sound). But the presentation was even more unconventional: A sauce of chicken stock and milk.