Vegetable meatballs with cream sauce and mustard

Today I have two surprises for you! First, we welcome Juana, who many of you will know from her beautiful blog La cocina de Babel . And with her comes another surprise, and it is this delicious recipe for vegetable meatballs with a cream and mustard sauce that you will love. I won't say any more, the photo speaks for itself...

I love the arrival of autumn so I can start cooking again. If during the summer my preparations become basic to unimaginable limits and I barely touch the ingredients, in autumn (and I think you do too) it is time to return to more elaborate preparations that bring us the warmth of home.

The recipe I am bringing you is from one of my favorite authors, Donna Hay. I truly admire her recipes, which are not only delicious and easy to make, but they never fail, and that is something that I cannot say about all of them in all the years I have been cooking and trying recipes from famous authors.

This recipe is very versatile and you will see that you can modify it each time depending on the ingredients you have available. In my case, I rarely make it exactly the same and in fact the recipe I present to you today is not exactly the same as Donna Hay's original, despite everything I assure you that it will not disappoint you.

These delicious meatballs are perfect for celebrating a meatless day, but they are still a very complete meal since their ingredients include beans and rice, making them a very complete dish that will only require a piece of fresh bread to dip in its delicious and delicate cream sauce and, if you want to add a fresh touch, a green salad.

And without further ado, here are these beautiful, sexy and delicate friends!

De Buyer French Collection Cast Iron Skillet

Ingredients

• 150g portobello mushrooms
• 400 grams of cooked and drained beans
• 1 teaspoon finely chopped thyme
• 1 clove of garlic, minced
• Salt and pepper
• 150g cooked brown rice
• 1 small egg
• 75gr of whole wheat flour
• 1 spring onion cut into thin slices
• 2 extra garlic cloves crushed
• 500ml of liquid cream
• 1 heaping tablespoon Edmond Fallot Dijon mustard
• 25gr crushed pistachios
• Trilloliva olive oil

Preparation

1. Place the portobello mushrooms and beans in a food processor and blend until they are well combined and form a paste.
2. Place the bean and portobello mixture in a bowl and add the thyme, garlic, rice, egg, flour, salt and pepper. Knead everything together until well mixed and leave to rest for an hour in the refrigerator so that the mixture takes on consistency and is easier to handle.
3. Moisten your hands with a little olive oil and form meatballs. You can make them big with your hands as I did, or smaller (you can use meatball tongs to help you), which will make them much easier to handle and then fry.
4. Heat about two centimetres of oil in the French De Buyer pan and fry the meatballs in batches, turning them until they look golden. Once ready, drain them on absorbent paper and set aside.
5. In the same pan , remove almost all the oil and add the spring onion and garlic. After a few minutes, add the cream, mustard , salt and pepper and cook over a very low heat for about four minutes, making sure it does not boil.
6. Once the sauce is ready, put the meatballs back into the pan, stirring carefully so that they are soaked in the sauce and decorate with the chopped pistachio.