Indian Curry Meatballs

I had a hankering for something Indian so I went searching the web for some inspiration. I initially thought I'd take a stab at making one of my favorite eggplant dishes, baingan bharta, but in the end I decided to do my own take on this Curried Meatball recipe from Everyday Paleo.

For the meatballs, I mixed together the following:

1 lb ground turkey (higher fat, not the lean 1% fat)
1 lb ground pork
1/2 c finely diced red onion
1/3 c finely diced, peeled apple (I used my food processor for both this and the onion)
1 egg
2 T curry powder (I used Trader Joe's)
1 t black pepper
~2 t kosher salt

After mixing the ingredients together really well, I scooped up the mixture in large rounded tablespoonfuls, formed them into meatballs and browned them in a nonstick pan with a little coconut oil in two batches:

Once the meatballs were done, I moved them to my 4 qt crockpot and added a little more coconut oil, 1/2 of a medium onion, diced and 1 t of crushed garlic to the pan. Once the aromatics had softened a bit, I added 2 T of curry powder and let that cook for about a minute. Then I added half of a can of tomato paste (about 2 1/2 T), 1 c of pork stock, a 14.5 oz can of diced tomatoes, and a can of full fat coconut milk. Once everything was well blended and the sauce was simmering again, I poured it over the meatballs in the crockpot and set it on high:

You could also easily let the meatballs simmer in the sauce on the stovetop until cooked through, but I was multi-tasking and didn't know when I'd get around to actually eating. When I was ready for dinner, all I needed to do was make some cauliflower rice to serve the curry over. I removed the florets from the stem and rinsed them off, then processed them in my food processor in batches until they were the size of grains of rice:

Make sure you don't overstuff your food processor or you'll end up with mush on the bottom and whole florets on top. You really don't need to pulse long to get the size you need. It also helps to make sure the cauliflower is pretty dry. From there, I only needed to saute some diced shallot in a bit of coconut oil:

then add the "rice", cover and let it steam until it was soft with just a bit of bite left:

I plated the meatballs and sauce over the cauliflower rice in a bowl and that was dinner:

The best part of cauliflower rice, by the way...the fact that you can dig into a bowl of food that feels like a carby indulgence when really you're eating vegetables!

Thanks to my office being closed as a result of the "snow day" I also got my pork belly confited (in lard, how awesome is that?!) and there's a batch of Zenbelly's Bacon Jam in my oven as I type. I can't wait to try it on a bit of apple when it's done! Here's a photo of the belly before it went into the oven:

Even with all of that, I got a lot of work done. Yay for working at home and productive snow days! Did anyone else take advantage of the weather (or lack thereof) to get any cooking done?