Tag Archives: pasta

January 18, 2013

Baked spaghetti

I have been cogitating over what to say about casseroles and, after a half a glass of red wine, I have come to this: Casseroles are a lot of damn work. And the recipients of the end product never appreciate this fact.

Casseroles are great on the back end. They yield multiple leftovers which, generally speaking, are better the next day. On the front end, though, they are time consuming and labor intensive. I don’t want to turn you off to baked spaghetti because it is truly yummy and the ONLY time I ever combine spaghetti or sauce with Cheddar cheese.

But here’s how the prep goes:

1. Haul out your biggest pot to make the sauce, chop up the veg, brown the ground chuck, add the rest of the ingredients, cook for about 30 minutes while watching the Ellen DeGeneres show and drinking a glass of wine. That’s about an hour total.

2. Haul out your widest pan to cook the pasta. If you don’t know Harold McGee’s revolutionary way to cook pasta, read it here. That’s maybe 15 minutes.

3. Assemble the casserole. And here’s the irritating part: CLEAN UP ALL THE POTS, SPOONS, KNIVES, CUTTING BOARDS AND OTHER EQUIPMENT YOU’VE USED. Am I yelling? Apparently, I am. Sadly, at this point, the Ellen show has ended and I must resort to watching four-year-old episodes of Paula Deen while washing, drying and putting away all the dirty stuff. It’s kind of hard watching Paula plow through a cake with two sticks of butter, hamburgers served on Krispy Kreme doughnuts and fried ice cream now that we all know she has diabetes. But I digress.

4. Serve casserole and try to bite your tongue when the kitchen help only has one pan to wash. It’s not their fault. They don’t even know that the rash from your dishpan hands started two hours ago.

That said, this is a great casserole for cold weather. By the way, it has come to my attention that I never offer up how many servings a recipe makes. I don’t want to make value judgments. You decide. That’s not on me.

Baked spaghetti

8 ounces thin spaghetti

1 egg, beaten

2 ½ tablespoons butter

I recipe spaghetti sauce (recipe follows)

2 cups shredded sharp Cheddar cheese

Cook pasta in heavily salted water in a large pan over medium high heat until the pasta is al dente. The water does not need to be boiling when you add the pasta. Just make sure you swirl it around with tongs to keep the strands separate as the water heats up.

Drain the pasta and combine it with the egg and butter in a bowl.

In a 2-quart casserole dish, layer the bottom with some of the sauce. Add half the spaghetti and a third of the cheese.  Add another layer of the sauce, the rest of the spaghetti and another third of the cheese. Top with one more layer of sauce and the rest of the cheese.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until the cheese on top is beginning to brown.

Spaghetti sauce:

2 pounds ground chuck

2 teaspoons salt

½ cup finely diced carrot

½ cup finely diced onion

2 large cloves garlic, chopped

1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes

1 cup dry red wine

1 ½ tablespoons dried oregano

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

Salt and pepper to taste.

Brown the chuck in a large Dutch oven over medium high heat, adding the 2 teaspoons salt. About halfway through browning, add the carrot and onion. Continue cooking until the vegetables are soft and translucent, the grease has disappeared and the meat is liberally browned. Add the garlic and cook for about a minute.

Add the crushed tomatoes, red wine, oregano and paprika. Lower heat to medium low and simmer for 30 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings with salt and pepper.

Note: You will have some spaghetti sauce left over. It freezes beautiful for you to pull out on a busy weeknight.

 

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January 16, 2013

The best spaghetti sauce ever

Betsy, Kim and I were having a conversation today over our horseradish Cheddar, apple and bacon sandwiches at CRC about spaghetti sauce. Kim’s mom used tomato paste in hers, Betsy’s grandmother used the juice from the jars of tomatoes she put up every fall and I use canned crushed tomatoes. There is no “best spaghetti sauce ever” because the best spaghetti sauce is the one your mom or grandma made.

I got on here tonight to post a really good recipe for baked spaghetti, but when I went back to find the sauce recipe in the archives I figured out I’d never actually posted it. Here I have the “best spaghetti sauce ever” and I haven’t even posted the recipe. What a moron.

So here’s why this is the best spaghetti sauce in our family. We are meaty sauce people. We like a hint of tomato as a background note to meat, specifically ground chuck. We like the depth of flavor a good dose of dry red wine gives the sauce. I like to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food. And we like a lot of oregano. This may not be your cup of tea, but I am an award-winning spaghetti sauce cook at 5117.

Tomorrow, the baked spaghetti. Tonight, the sauce. And do I need to remind you how to cook the pasta? Here you go.

Spaghetti Sauce

2 pounds ground chuck

2 teaspoons salt

½ cup finely diced carrot

½ cup finely diced onion

2 large cloves garlic, chopped

1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes

1 cup dry red wine

1 ½ tablespoons dried oregano

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

Salt and pepper to taste.

Brown the chuck in a large Dutch oven over medium high heat, adding the 2 teaspoons salt. About halfway through browning, add the carrot and onion. Continue cooking until the vegetables are soft and translucent, the grease has disappeared and the meat is liberally browned. Add the garlic and cook for about a minute.

Add the crushed tomatoes, red wine, oregano and paprika. Lower heat to medium low and simmer for 30 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings with salt and pepper.

 

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November 21, 2012

Pasta with smoked tomatoes and garlic

Tomorrow, Thanksgiving, it’s the dressing, the gravy, the mashed potatoes, the pumpkin pie. Forget the turkey. It’s healthy. We crave the sides. Our bellies will be busting. And we will be happy. And sleepy.

But tonight, virtue.  Hold the thought.

Pasta with smoked dried tomatoes and garlic

8 ounces pasta

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

1 yellow pepper, thinly sliced

1 red pepper, thinly sliced

½ cup red onion, thinly sliced

1/3 cup smoked dried tomatoes, thinly sliced

1 clove garlic, minced

Juice of ½ lemon

1 cup Parmesan cheese, shredded

Heat enough water, well salted, in a large pan to accommodate the pasta. Add the pasta, swirl with tongs and continue to cook until the pasta is done. The water will continue to heat, but does not need to come to a boil. Just move the pasta about every once in a while to keep it separate.

Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a sauté pan. Add the peppers and onions and sauté until tender and beginning to brown. Add the tomatoes and garlic. Continue sautéing for another minute.  Add the lemon juice.

Add the cooked pasta to the skillet, the remaining olive oil and the cheese. Combine and serve!

 

 

 

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October 27, 2012

Lemon pasta with mushrooms and cherry tomatoes

Quick! You can still find cherry tomatoes in the Farmer’s Market. Grab them! It will be another seven months before they’re back in season.

Yes, I know. You can buy them in the grocery store year-round. But they’re not the same and you know it. Part of the joy of eating seasonally is deprivation. Those home-grown tomatoes taste all the better when you’ve waited more than half a year for them.

So, even the Meat Eater (Mark) lapped up this recipe, which really isn’t a recipe at all. It’s just a procedure. You cook 8 ounces of pasta until it’s al dente. Preferably you do this using the Harold McGee method of not boiling the water. I swear it makes the pasta taste even better. In the meantime, you film a saute pan with olive oil and  add 8 ounces of sliced mushrooms. Brown those and then add a little more oil and the juice of half a lemon.  Throw in the cherry tomatoes and saute until their skin starts to crack. Mix it all up with the pasta and top with some snipped Italian parsley. That’s it! You can throw some shredded Parmesan cheese in there if you want. And why wouldn’t you?

 

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October 22, 2012

Lasagna

There are many theories about the origins of lasagna. Some say it evolved from an ancient Greek dish. Another is that it came from the name of the dish it was cooked in. And a third, quite unbelievable, posits that lasagna actually originated in 14th-century England.

But we all know who really invented lasagna. Stouffer’s.  It was invented in the early 1960s for people who didn’t know how to cook. It was invented for my mother. Specifically. My mother was wildly enthusiastic about anything that came in a box. She once came home, cheeks flushed, with her newest discovery – Kraft spaghetti and tomato sauce in a box. You simply mixed the packet of tomato powder with water and – voila – spaghetti sauce.

So she was practically delirious when Stouffer’s arrived on the scene. The lasagna was especially alluring. So cosmopolitan. So foreign in northern Illinois, the land of meatloaf. So, so…easy.  It was many years before I figured out that actual lasagna, the really good stuff, did not come in an aluminum tray inside a red box.

I have perfected my version of lasagna now. It involves no-boil lasagna noodles which taste far better than the irritating ones you have to boil and then rent extra kitchen space just to lay them all out before you assemble the dish. It involves a deeply rich, sauce that tastes more of meat than tomato. And it involves whole milk ricotta. WHOLE MILK. I do not understand part-skim ricotta. Why would anyone want that? Oh, and mountains of mozzarella. If there was a higher geological form than a mountain, I would use that term here.

Lasagna

One recipe sauce

One 15-ounce container whole milk ricotta cheese

1 egg, beaten

4 cups shredded mozzarella cheese

One package no-boil lasagna noodles

Sauce:

2 lbs. ground chuck

1/3 cup diced carrots

1/3 cup diced onion

2 large garlic cloves, minced

1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes, preferably Cento brand

½ cup dry red wine

2 tablespoons Italian herbs

½ teaspoon smoked paprika

Salt and Pepper

Brown ground chuck until bits of it have taken on a deep brown color and most of the fat has been absorbed back in to the meat. Remove from pan. Add carrots and onions and add a little vegetable oil if the pan is too dry. Saute until tender. Add garlic and sauté about 30 seconds. Add back the ground beef, the crushed tomatoes, the wine, the Italian herbs and the paprika. Salt and pepper to taste. Let simmer for 15 minutes.

Mix together the egg and the ricotta cheese.

Assemble the lasagna: Put a thin layer of sauce on the bottom of a 9-by-9 square pan. Top with a layer of the noodles making sure all the noodles come in contact with the sauce. Spread a third of the ricotta mixture on the noodles and top with another layer of sauce. Sprinkle with mozzarella cheese. Repeat for two more layers, ending with a final layer of the sauce and a generous sprinkling of mozzarella cheese.

Bake at 350 degrees for 50-60 minutes.

Note: You will have more sauce than you need for this recipe. Freeze the rest and use for spaghetti or another pan of lasagna.

 

 

 

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September 10, 2012

Tri-color pasta salad

This is the year that I learned I do not want to be a caterer. I am about to cater my second event, a wedding reception for our dear youth minister and his lovely soon-to-be bride. The first was also a bridal reception. And the thing that makes me know I am not cut out for this career is the math. Oh, my God. The math.

How do you know, for instance, how much 50 people will eat at a 6 p.m. reception? That was my first dip in the catering pool. I thought, “Geez, it’s dinner time. They’ll eat a lot.” So I made a lot. Too much, as it turns out. Of course, if you have a choice – and you almost always do – you’d rather have too much than too little. But there was way too much. Those people ate like birds.

This time out, it’s for 150 people. That’s a lot of people. The reception is also at 6 p.m. So for the past few weeks, I’ve been madly consulting catering websites to figure out how much pasta salad to make, among other things, for 150 people as an appetizer portion. The recipes are daunting. One of them calls for starting with nine pounds of pasta. Nine pounds! If I cooked that much pasta at once, I’d be standing at the stove (and liberally drinking) for about 12 hours. Fortunately, there is a committee to help me with this.

I have discovered two very important things as I’ve gone about my almost-done catering career. First, ask a professional. I have one. His name is Christo Gonzales and he’s a private chef in New York City. In the flash of a second after I asked him how much food to make I got this back via Facebook: 3 pieces per person for a single appetizer and 4 ounces for something like pasta salad. OK, then. Math. Math. If I need 150 portions of pasta salad at 4 ounces per serving that would be (pulling out calculator now) 600 ounces. OK, 600 ounces. Now, 600 ounces divided by 16 ounces (1 pound) is 37.5 pounds of pasta. No, that can’t be right. Can it? I hate math. Did I tell you I had to have a math tutor all the way through high school? My dad, who was an accountant, tried to help me but I would just break down sobbing so he stopped.

Then I turned to my other new discovery, a website called Yummly. If you go on this site, and find a recipe that’s close to what you want to do (or just use one of theirs), you can type in the number of servings and it will calculate the ingredients for you! No math!

OK, my head is hurting now. Here’s the pasta salad I’ll be serving at the reception, cut down just for your own home use. It makes about four cups. I think I can at least get my head around that.

Tri-color pasta salad

3/8 cup olive oil

1 ½ tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1/8 teaspoon black pepper

8 ounces tri-color corkscrew pasta

½ red pepper, julienned

½ yellow pepper, julienned

½ green pepper, julienned

1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved

1 ounce sliced black olives

4 ounces Monterrey Jack cheese, cubed

 

Whisk together the olive oil, vinegar, mustard, Parmesan cheese and black pepper. Set aside.

Cook the pasta in boiling water until al dente. Drain and mix with the dressing in a large bowl.

When pasta has cooled to room temperature, add the peppers, tomatoes, black olives and Monterrey Jack cubes.

 

 

 

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July 8, 2012

Roasted tomatoes

I was right! A few weeks ago I wrote about the savage attack on my fledgling tomato plants and I blamed the groundhog that lives under our bedroom deck. So yesterday, Mark came running out of our bathroom and hissed, “Come here!” And out the window I saw this:

I know it’s not the best photo in the world because I had to take it from the bathroom window. But there’s the little bastard trying to get every last leaf off the plants.

So I am relying on tomatoes from the Farmer’s Market to make roasted tomatoes. There is nothing better than the concentrated flavor of a roasted tomato and they are beyond easy to do. My first order of summer with the roasted tomatoes is to combine them simply with pasta and freshly shredded Parmesan cheese, adding the olive oil the tomatoes roast in as the sauce along with a little balsamic vinegar. But they are also delicious stirred into soups and stews and as part of a grilled or roasted vegetable platter. Yes, you can freeze them because most of the moisture is drawn out in the roasting process. But I am too greedy in the moment and I never have enough to freeze.

And if you’re wondering about the pinch of sugar, I believe this is a Southern thing but it always works. We add a pinch of sugar to many vegetables, particularly to tomatoes and squash. It seems to bring out the richness. Or we think it does.

Roasted tomatoes

Vine-ripened tomatoes

Extra-virgin olive oil

Sugar

Salt and pepper

Slice the tomatoes in thick slices and place on a foil-lined cookie sheet with a rim. Drizzle liberally with extra-virgin olive oil. Sprinkle with a small amount of sugar. Salt and pepper to taste.

Bake at 300 degrees for several hours or until tomatoes have shriveled and started to turn brown around the edges. Don’t throw away the olive oil! It’s now infused with tomato flavor and is wonderful as a pasta sauce with a little balsamic vinegar.

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April 24, 2012

Flat chicken and green noodles

Well, this just isn’t going to work out at all. Noah called today to tell me he’d found an apartment off-campus. But clearly he’s not ready to live on his own yet. I mean, just look at him. He can barely see over the counter. An apartment is a lot of responsibility. He doesn’t know how to do laundry. He doesn’t know how to cook. I expect he could figure out how to fit the Eggo waffles in a toaster, but I’m not going to let him use a toaster. He’d burn himself. He’s just a little boy. A wee little boy.

Okay. I know. I’m delusional. But that’s what I was thinking this morning when my wee little boy, who

The real Noah: large and able to accomplish simple tasks on his own.

is edging toward six feet tall, told me he’d found an apartment. With Bunny’s help. His grandmother has been my long-distance goon squad for the last month.  We were in total agreement. Nothing that exhibited evidence of roaches or vermin. Nothing where you could see dirt through the floor boards. Nothing icky. For $400 a month. That was his limit. I truly thought I had him at a standstill because there’s no way he could find something for $400 a month.

Dammit. Dammit Boy. He did. “Uh, the only thing, Mom, is that I have to move in in June,” he said over the phone. “They won’t hold the apartment until August. ” … So that means you’re not coming home this summer? “I hate it, Mom, I was really looking forward to coming home for the summer, but I don’t really have a choice.” Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Oh, hell. I remember wanting to live off campus and the place I found would have horrified my parents had they seen it. It was a former funeral home in Murray, Kentucky, and there was a suspiciously long stainless steel sink in my room. I shared it with four other people. I loved it. It was a total dump, but I loved it. It’s just that it’s different when it’s your baby of almost 20 living in an apartment. On his own. Did I tell you I’m going to turn his room into a guest room? Ha! That will fix him.

So, flat chicken and green noodles. Noah’s favorite childhood meal. I think he can accomplish that in his efficiency apartment. In his spacious kitchenette with a 24-inch stove he can probably reach into the refrigerator for the ingredients, cook the meal, clean up and get ready for bed without moving an inch. He called it flat chicken because I pounded the chicken breasts into thin cutlets. And green noodles? Just pesto and pasta.

Flat Chicken and Green Noodles

2 chicken breasts, pounded into 1/4-inch cutlets

Seasoned breadcrumbs

Vegetable oil

Juice of one lemon

1 4-ounce container pesto

1/2 pound thin spaghetti

Put the breadcrumbs on a plate. Rinse each cutlet with cold water and then dredge them in the breadcrumbs. Heat the oil and lemon juice to medium high heat. Saute the cutlets until golden brown.

Cook the pasta starting in warm water in a shallow pan deep enough to submerge the pasta. Keep moving the pasta around with tongs to keep it separated as the water continues to get hotter. The pasta will be cooked al dente before the water reaches a boil. Mix with pesto sauce.

 

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March 21, 2012

A college student cooks…well

Noah checks out

Teachable moments. When a child is five, it seems there are a thousand of them. By the time they’re twelve, the stack starts to dwindle. And, at almost 20, I am now down to five or six. Or so it seems.

Noah wants an apartment next year and, with that, will come cooking his own meals. He will have a budget of $100 a week (what, in a year, his meal plan would cost) and I am superior in my assumption that he has no idea how to make that money stretch for a week. So we test the theory. We go to the grocery store with a calculator.

We hit the perimeter of the store first. That’s where you want to shop. The produce, meat and dairy sections. Only go to the dark side for staples like pasta, oil and spices. Hamburger Helper? NO! Chips Ahoy? DANGER! Velveeta? Okay, you’ve got me there. I love me some Velveeta.

So, to make a long story short, he did great. Dammit. He bought (I bought) a package of chicken breasts, thin-cut pork chops and two pounds of bulk sausage. Low rent ham for sandwiches. Lower rent bread. Frozen vegetables, rice, pasta, apples, coffee, canned soup and store brand cheese. He bypassed the relatively expensive convenience foods. He was unsuitably smug in his victory and totally discounted the fact that I had guided him away from the frozen pizza.

Having a basket full of groceries and knowing what to do with them are two different things, however.

Pork chops, mashed potatoes and green beans

Hah! I’ll get him here. “So, son?” I say coyly. “Why don’t you cook us supper with your new groceries? Just whip something up. Anything, really.”

And I leave. I go down to the garage to smoke and play World of Warcraft, confident in the fact that when I ascend again there will be mass chaos, a smoke-filled kitchen and burnt shards of something inedible on the plate.

“Mom?” he says. “Supper’s ready.”

I ascend. I gasp. How did friggin’ Emeril Lagasse find my kitchen? Noah has made coffee rub/breadcrumb coated pork chops, cooked perfectly until just rosy in the middle. He has made buttery mashed potatoes with garlic. He has made hericot verts with garlic. Alright, too much garlic but I am not going to quibble. It was all delicious.

So, tonight we go again. Chicken breasts, chopped green and yellow pepper, red onion, mushrooms.

Chicken, peppers, mushrooms and pasta. Noah style.

He chops the chicken and seasons it with Montreal Chicken Seasoning. Sautes in oil, removes the chicken and then adds the vegetables.  When they’re nice and brown he adds a bit of Madeira (not something he’ll have on campus – I can’t see you)  and then adds a can of cream of mushroom soup. This is going to suck, I think. He thins the soup with milk, adds back the chicken, and then puts the entire mixture over pasta.

Dang it! It’s good. If I hadn’t watched him add the soup, I would never have known. I had seconds. And I wasn’t being polite.

I am proud of my boy. I would like to think that my miniscule attempt at one of the last few teachable moments had the seeds of germination in the hours he’s spent watching me cook over the last 19 years. But as I told him tonight there is no way to teach someone to cook. You either have the intuition or you don’t. You’re a recipe follower or you’re a creator. You can pick up tips and tricks, but you have to just have the knowledge of what goes with what and how much in your gut.

And he has it. No brag, just fact.

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February 20, 2012

Comfort food

Canned Tamales, Cold Pork & Beans, Mashed Potatoes. Photo courtesy of Kim Council

My friend, Kim, got some great news last week. Her sister’s Hepatitis C, which she has lived with for 30 years, is now undetectable. Which led to this bizarre meal her mother used to make: canned tamales, cold pork and beans, and mashed potatoes. Kim says it’s her English mother’s tribute to Mexican food. And for Kim this is comfort food and what her sister, Gloria, requested as a celebration meal.

Comfort food. Really more like memory food. Those odd combinations that are just so right, so indelibly linked to our past. Usually created by mothers, who had no idea at the time that their spur-of-the-moment thrown together creations would endure and, yes, comfort.

"Flat" chicken

For me, it’s a peanut butter and butter sandwich. I still eat them when I’m feeling a little blue. My mother probably just ran out of jelly and made the sandwich out of desperation to feed a five-year-old. For Mark, it’s blackberry cobbler. He can still see himself in his mind’s eye picking the blackberries with his Granny Belle. For Noah, it will probably be “flat” chicken and green noodles. Definitely a thrown-together meal with thin chicken cutlets dredged in seasoned bread crumbs and fried in oil and lemon juice, plus spaghetti with pesto sauce from the supermarket.

There is actually scientific evidence that proves that comfort food makes you feel better. Researchers at the University of Buffalo found that not only does eating comfort food elevate your mood, but just thinking about it is restorative. So here’s my other comfort food that I’m thinking about right now. Liverwurst. Yes, liverwurst. I’d tag along with my dad when he went to the butcher, who always gave me a slice of liverwurst as a treat. My mother never made liver so I didn’t know it was supposed to be yucky. All the Mayhews still love a good liverwurst sandwich: mayonnaise (lots of it, Duke’s naturally), thin sliced liverwurst and sliced white onion. We are prohibited from attending social events after eating these.

I’m thinking about a good stinking liverwurst sandwich right now and feeling pretty happy about it.

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