Pasta sauce in the slow cooker.

I had half a bulb of fennel in the fridge to use up. My husband likes to eat this as a salad with a little olive oil and salt & pepper. However, I just don’t understand the attraction with this type of salad personally as to me it’s a little boring. It is something he grew up with and is part of his Italian heritage. In this instance, I wanted to cook the fennel up rather than have it eaten raw. That’s when I decided to make this fennel pasta sauce with meatballs.

I do however like fennel cooked in meals as the flavour works well both meat and seafood. When raw, fennel is crunchy and sweet. Once cooked, it becomes silky soft. In both instances you can still detect a mild licorice flavour.

What is fennel?

It’s also a slightly underrated vegetable so gets you to be a little more creative than normal. A fennel bulb, which looks kind of like a cross between an onion and the base of a bunch of celery, has a sweet perfume, anise-like flavour. Rather than making food taste like licorice, fennel gives a light, bright spring-like quality to foods. Plus, if you didn’t know… fennel is good for you!

I used a slow cooker in this recipe. Normally I would make pasta sauce on the stovetop but as I had a busy afternoon ahead, I wanted to save time making dinner. This meant I could set and forget this tomato & fennel pasta sauce for several hours while the flavours blended together and intensified.

This tomato and fennel pasta sauce has a sneaky zucchini added as I like my girls to get as many veggies into their diet as possible. Zucchini (or as I often call it, courgette, still after my years in NZ), is such a versatile vegetable. You can sneak it into so many things without changing the taste of the meal you’re making. With the meatballs, I just added them into the sauce to cook. If you prefer to brown them up before adding them into the sauce that’s up to you. I personally found that browning them just added unnecessary fat into the meal.

Tomato & Fennel Pasta Sauce with Meatballs

Fennel is great when cooked yet it's not a vegetable many people are familiar with. It adds a flavour dimension that works exceptionally well when used to make a pasta sauce. By using a slow cooker to do the hard work, you can sit back and relax knowing the sauce when finished will be delicious.

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Prep Time 10 minutes mins

Cook Time 8 hours hrs

Total Time 8 hours hrs 10 minutes mins

Servings 4 people

Ingredients

 

Sauce:

• 1/2 fennel bulb, diced
• 600 ml passata or homemade tomato puree
• 6 cloves garlic, crushed
• 3 teaspoons beef stock
• 2 large anchovy fillets
• 1 large onion, diced
• 1 zucchini, grated
• 1 tablespoon parsley, chopped dried or fresh

Meatballs

• 500 g pork mince
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 tablespoon parsley, chopped fresh or dried
• 2 teaspoons oregano, chopped fresh or dried

Instructions

 

Sauce:

• Put all ingredients into slow cooker.
• Cook on auto for 7 hours, or low for 8 hours.

Meatballs:

• Mix all ingredients together.
• Form into small balls and add into the slow cooker in the last 1.5 hours before the sauce is finished.

Notes

Serve with spaghetti or fettuccine and garlic bread.