Easy Sunday Dinner: Potato Balls in Tomato Sauce

Today I bring you another incredibly easy, almost-no-recipe-required dish: Potato Balls in Tomato Sauce.

Whenever I have a choice of pasta, rice, or potatoes, 99 percent of the time, potatoes win. I love them in salads, soups, mashed, fried, or roasted. I could eat potatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

When I was little, my paternal grandmother made knishes with a filling of boiled potatoes and sauteed onions. I know it's basically just three ingredients (potatoes, oil, onions) seasoned with salt and pepper, but it's one of the best combinations!

When a few friends came over last Saturday for a cooking date, we decided to make baked pockets: each one of us was to contribute a filling.

I decided to make a filling reminiscent of my grandmother's knishes as my contribution. I also thought it would be fun to make tomato sauce for our baked pockets and simply added a few ingredients to a store-bought tomato sauce.

I had leftovers of both the potato mixture and the tomato sauce and decided to make a simple dish from them: Potato Balls in Tomato Sauce.

Potato Balls in Tomato Sauce
Ingredients
5-7 medium sized potatoes
olive oil for sauteeing
1 large onion, diced
28 ounce can tomato sauce
1-2 tablespoons Southwestern Chipotle spice mix
sugar to taste
2-4 thyme sprigs
sour cream

Directions
1. Cook potatoes in salted water until tender. Peel and mash.

2. Meanwhile, heat your skillet. Add oil, allow it to heat, and add onions. Saute the onions until they are golden brown. This might take about twenty minutes. Add to the mashed potatoes and season with salt and pepper.

3. At the same time, in a medium-sized pot, combine tomato sauce with Southwester Chipotle spices, sugar and thyme sprigs. Let the sauce bubble.

4. In a separate skillet, heat enough oil to cover the bottom. Form golf-sized balls from the potato/onion mixture and saute in oil until slightly brown and warmed through. {You might want to do this in a nonstick skillet. I browned mine in Le Creuset, and most of them stuck to the bottom.} Throw in a few sprigs of thyme and allow them to crisp up.

5. Serve the potato balls in a puddle of tomato sauce. Garnish with crispy thyme sprigs and sour cream. {I came up with the idea of sour cream after I took the photographs, so just use your imagination!}

This dish reminded me of gnocchi with tomato sauce, but was so much easier to make. I had this dish for lunch, but it would be a super quick dinner idea on a weeknight, or a simple weekend meal.

What's your favorite dish to make with potatoes?