Orzo with Roasted Pepper-Tomato Sauce & Meatballs
Roast the pepper. Sauté garlic and onion in olive oil. Blend everything with cream cheese. Those three moves produce a sauce that coats orzo like it’s been simmering all afternoon, and the whole dinner, meatballs included, lands on the table in 20 minutes with 36g of protein.
The handful of arugula on top isn’t decoration. The peppery bite against the creamy sauce makes every forkful land differently.
Ingredients
- bell pepper 1
- orzo 3 ounces
- onion 0.5
- garlic 1 clove
- sun-dried tomato 1 piece
- 96% lean ground beef 3 ounces
- olive oil 1.5 tablespoon
- Italian seasoning 1.5 teaspoon
- paprika (ground spice) 1 teaspoon
- diced tomatoes 4 ounces
- cream cheese, reduced fat 2.5 tablespoon
- water 1 tablespoon
- arugula 1 handful
Method
-
Preheat the oven to 430 °F (220°C).
-
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
-
Halve the bell pepper, remove the seeds and cut each half into quarters. Place the pepper strips skin side up on the baking sheet. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes.
-
Cook the orzo according to the package instructions until al dente.
-
Finely chop the onion and mince the garlic. Cut the sun-dried tomato into strips.
-
Season the ground beef with salt and pepper, knead together and form into small balls with your (wet) hands. Set these aside on a plate.
-
Heat half of the oil in a pan. Sauté the onion and garlic for 2 minutes. Add the sun-dried tomato, Italian seasoning, paprika and diced tomatoes to the pan and stir together. Let this simmer on low heat for another 5 minutes.
-
Then put the tomato sauce, roasted peppers, cream cheese and water in the container of an immersion blender and blend until smooth and creamy. If needed, add a dash more water.
-
Heat the remaining oil in the same pan and brown the meatballs on all sides until almost cooked through, about 5 minutes. Add the sauce to the pan and let it reduce slightly on medium heat. Stir the orzo into the pepper sauce and heat for another 2 minutes.
-
Serve the orzo on a (deep) plate and top with a handful of arugula.
Blend the sauce while the roasted pepper is still hot. The heat softens the pepper skin and melts the cream cheese on contact, so you get a smoother result with less work from the immersion blender.
Sautéing garlic and onion in olive oil before adding the tomatoes does more than build flavor. Research found that heating garlic or onion in oil changes the shape of lycopene, the red pigment in tomatoes, into a form your body absorbs up to 8 times more easily. Step 7 of this recipe runs that exact sequence: garlic and onion in olive oil first, then the tomatoes go in.
Honda et al. 2019 — Food & Function · DOIBehind this recipe
Can I use a different pasta instead of orzo?
Yes, but pick something small enough to hold the sauce. Orzo works because its shape traps the creamy pepper sauce in every spoonful. Penne or fusilli would be the closest substitutes. Long pasta like spaghetti lets the sauce slide off, and you lose the coating that makes this dish work.
Is 35 grams of fat a lot for one meal?
It depends on your daily total. A Cochrane review of 57,000 participants found that dietary fat itself doesn’t cause fat gain. Total calorie balance does. The 35g in this meal comes mostly from olive oil (monounsaturated) and a small amount of cream cheese. For most people eating 2,000–2,500 kcal per day, that’s roughly a third of a reasonable daily fat budget.
Read the full evidence reviewWhy use both sun-dried and regular diced tomatoes?
They do different jobs. The diced tomatoes provide volume and liquid for the sauce base. The sun-dried tomato brings concentrated flavor and a deeper sweetness that regular tomatoes can’t match. There’s also a nutrient layer: research found that sun-dried tomatoes have about double the lycopene bioaccessibility of fresh tomatoes (58% vs 29%), because the drying process breaks down cell walls and frees the pigment.
Can I make this without an immersion blender?
Yes. Chop the roasted pepper into small pieces instead of blending, then stir the cream cheese directly into the tomato sauce until it melts. The sauce won’t be as smooth, but it’ll still be creamy enough to coat the orzo.
