“Riffing Recipes” and Grain-free Chicken Piccata Meatballs!

Chicken Piccata Meatballs

Happy Monday! If you’re here for the Chicken Piccata Meatball recipe, that is the bonus content for paid subscribers this week.  The rest of the newsletter is free!

Before I get into it, my organization gurus, Laura and Alison from Inspired Everyday Living, have an upcoming webinar on 9/22 and course called

Declutter & Manifest

Declutter your home, Manifest your dreams. 

And they are offering my community a 15% discount with the code PAMELA.  🙂

Laura and Alison believe your home is the key to manifesting your dreams.

Whether you are looking to improve a specific part of your life—your finances, your relationships, your work, your health—or you want to experience more love, joy, peace, and freedom in your life, you can achieve these goals by making changes in your home!

Onto this week’s topic!  I was discussing with some of my students the idea of improvising when cooking and tweaking recipes.  They were saying that they don’t have the confidence to veer off a recipe. And I understand the concern of a dish not turning out well and possibly wasting food.  Ugh.  But, it’s actually not hard to take a recipe that is tried and true and turn it into something that seems totally different.  Trust me, recipe developers and chefs do it all the time!

During the lockdown a few years ago when we didn’t have the luxury of going to the supermarket as often or having access to every ingredient, many people were forced to figure out how to work with what they had. After some time, confidence was built.  If this is something you’d like to try, I suggest baby steps and swapping likes with likes: an herb for an herb, a nut for a nut or a seed for a nut, a fruit for a fruit……

Late Summer Minestrone

Spices are a really easy way to change a recipe to make it something very different. In my first book, Kitchen Matters, I took a favorite recipe from my website, Late Summer Minestrone, and changed a few ingredients to create Mexican Vegetable Soup with Rice and Beans.  I literally swapped likes with likes.  If you don’t have my cookbook, here’s the recipe and then you can compare the two.  This soup is delicious, by the way!

Mexican Vegetable Soup with Rice and Beans

Mexican Vegetable Soup with Rice and Beans

2 tablespoons unrefined, cold-pressed extra-virgin olive oil or avocado oil

1 medium-size onion, coarsely chopped

2 celery stalks, coarsely chopped

2 medium-size carrots, coarsely chopped

4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1/4 teaspoon chipotle chile powder

1 pound fresh tomatoes, peeled, seeded and coarsely chopped, or 1 (18-ounce) jar, diced with juice

½ cup fresh cilantro leaves and tender stems, chopped

2 teaspoons sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

6 cups chicken or vegetable stock 

½ cup uncooked white or brown, long- or short-grain rice

4 small zucchini, cut into medium dice (about 4 cups)

1½ cups cooked pinto beans, or 1 (15-ounce) can, drained and rinsed

Handful of greens, such as spinach, baby kale, beet green leaves or Swiss chard, coarsely chopped (optional)

1. Heat the oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot over medium-low heat and add the onion, celery, carrots, and garlic. Cook until the vegetables are tender and the onion translucent, about 10 minutes. Add the spices and sauté for 1 minute, or until fragrant.

2. Add the tomatoes with their juice, half of the cilantro, and ½ teaspoon of sea salt. Cook for 5 minutes more, until the tomatoes are fragrant.

3. Add the stock, rice, 1½ teaspoons of salt, and pepper to taste, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat so that the soup simmers. Cook for about 10 minutes for white rice, 30 minutes for brown.

4. Add the zucchini and beans and cook for another 10 to 15 minutes, until the rice is tender.

5. Add the chopped greens, if using, and stir until wilted.  Serve with the remaining chopped cilantro and your desired toppings.

I kind of did the same thing with my Asian Turkey Meatballs and this new recipe for Chicken Piccata Meatballs which is the bonus content for this week’s newsletter.  They are incredible!

Asian Turkey Meatballs

The only time I recommend being more careful tweaking a recipe is with baking.  I am often asked if almond flour can be swapped for all-purpose flour, for example.  No.  They are not likes.  Almond flour is ground nuts and all-purpose flour is a ground gluten-containing grain.  They’re really different actually! Baking is more of a science and requires proper chemistry most of the time to work.  That said, if an ingredient is not integral to making the recipe function, then you can probably change it (walnuts in banana bread instead of chocolate chips or vice-versa.)

Even More Musings is an extension of my weekly newsletter, Monday Musings. My newsletter is a sponsor-free zone and is fully supported by readers like you. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to get Even More Musings! Each week, I share my tips and tricks along with a new recipe. For only $5/month or $50/year (less than $1 a newsletter), you'll also gain access to the entire archive, featuring favorites like My New Hyper-fixation High-Protein Fluffy Breakfast Bowl  and the Hillstone Copycat Emerald Kale Salad.