Spaghetti with Chipotle Albondigas

Hola I'm Daisy Martinez on eHow.com. I'm going to talk today about albondigas with pasta. Albondigas are the Latin twist on meatballs and what I've done is I started out with a very very simple tomato sauce, a little olive oil, some red chile flakes, a couple of cloves or garlic or to taste and a can of crushed tomatoes and we brought that up to a simmer. To that I'm going to add meatballs that I've made that are seasoned with onion, garlic, chipotle, chipotle peppers are smoked jalape?os so you have that beautiful smokiness. We have a cup or so of bread crumbs and a couple of eggs to bind everything together and because our meatballs are so highly flavored, it's okay that the sauce is so simple, all of those flavors are going to melt. Oh, I almost forgot, my favorite herb, Mexican herb, epazote, e - pa - zote, which is a cousin of mint, I find that if you mix three parts cilantro and one part mint you approximate the flavor. So you get all of those delicious herbs in there and you let the sauce simmer so that the meatballs really really flavor the sauce through, really so delicious. Okay and you do that at least 20 minutes or so so that those flavors really marry and then I've got some pasta that I've drained, we'll go ahead, we're going to add that to our bowl. I'm using spaghetti today but in Latin American we're very fond of a pasta, it's a short fat almost like a Rigatoni shape, a tube shape that we lovingly call macaronis. Okay, so we're good to go here, we have our pasta and our delicious sauce. Oh boy, that looks good. What do you think, should four meatballs be enough? And then because I'm going to gild the lily, let's just turn this off, I'm going to take some cotija cheese which is also an ingredient in the meatballs and I'm going to grate just a little bit, and cotija, what can I compare it to? A toss between a ricotta salata and a feta cheese. It's got a nice salty brininess to it, really good. Okay that looks beautiful. This is spaghetti and meatballs with a Latin spin. I'm Daisy Martinez for eHow.com.