Monday’s pumpkin spice latte (link here) was a great way to start pumpkin week. To continue on with pumpkin posts, I made the perfect fall dinner. I saw this recipe for pumpkin turkey meatballs with a cinnamon-sage tomato sauce and it looked incredible. I knew it would be a wonderful meal and great for this themed week.

The recipe is on the Food Network website, but it is from Joy Bauer (link here). She serves hers over spaghetti squash but I made mine with whole wheat spaghetti. This was such a nice dinner and you could easily serve 5-6 people (or just have a lot of leftovers)!

I’m a big fan of poultry (turkey/chicken), specifically in meatballs. The result is much lighter than using traditional red meat and I actually prefer the flavour. These meatballs were seasoned so well! There were lots of warm spices (cinnamon, sage, ginger, nutmeg), as well as a full cup of pumpkin puree, so there was no lack of flavour. The pumpkin also helps to keep the meatballs very moist as they bake and then simmer in the tomato sauce. Even if you didn’t want to make the full spaghetti, meatball and sauce meal, the meatballs on their own would be a great addition to a dinner!

And now about the sauce. It is made from tomato sauce (I subbed plain tomato passata), broth, more pumpkin puree and more lovely spices. It’s not a super sweet sauce, but it definitely has some sweetness to it because of the pumpkin. There is also 1 tbsp brown sugar in the sauce but you could omit to reduce sweetness more. It was a super creamy (although dairy free) sauce and it was great with the pasta and meatballs.

One thing to note: this recipe uses a lot of fresh sage, but I used dried instead because I couldn’t find any fresh sage at the store. So I used about 1 tsp dried sage in both the meatballs and sauce. That amount was perfect, it was not too strong but tasted just like fall.