I Love You Mr. Basil

I made this yummy recipe for tomato sauce on Friday night. It was so good, Arie ate the leftovers by the spoonful, without pasta.

I was really afraid that it would be painstakingly annoying to remove the skins from the roma tomatoes, but au contraire. You boil them for 2 minutes, drop them into a bowl of cold water, and the skins come off quite easily. 'Tis a tad time-consuming, but not particularly difficult.

As you can see in the photo above, I made it kinda chunky. If you wanted yours more sauce-y and less chunky, you could chop the tomatoes in a food processor or chopper before simmering them. Also, it seems that the longer you simmer, the less chunks you get. Personally, I'm a fan of the chunky. But as you can see, after half an hour of simmering it was getting more saucified.

Since I had never made sauce-not-from-the-jar, I decided to go with a pretty simple, standard garlic & basil tomato sauce. However, in the future I could see myself throwing in some hot peppers, or something. In other words, the recipe is totally versatile.

Just like Grandma used to make it

The end!

Why so non-sinful, Fettucine with Prosciutto, Tomatoes, and Cream?

For our "pasta with sauce that's not from a jar" challenge, I picked this recipe, because "Fettucine with Prosciutto, Tomatoes, and Cream" sounds like The.Most.Decadent.Pasta.Ever. I imagined a lake of creamy tomatoishness with getaway islands of proscuittio, and a couple of linguines floating lazily by.

However, the pasta was actually pretty light, so that was kind of a let-down given my expectations, but it was still good. I basically fried some prosciutto kind of how you would bacon and then put it aside; sauted some garlic, added 3 cans of petite diced tomatoes,* then threw in some parsley, 1/2 a cup of cream, grated parmesan, and pepper, and then put the proscuittio back in. The recipe kind of quit before specifying whether you should mix the pasta and sauce together before serving it or not. Since I overcooked the pasta a bit, I washed it in cold water so it wouldn't get even soggier, and then felt I had to add it to the sauce to heat it back up to a reasonable temperatur. The whole thing didn't take long at all.

All in all, it was good but not mind-blowing. I would make it again but maybe with a different kind of cured meat, since the prosciutto didn't add as much flavor as I would have thought (and also cost $7 for a half pound).

*I did not understand the "not from a jar" rule to exclude canned tomatoes, although I'm sure Myrtle is going to make her sauce entirely from scratch using heirloom tomatoes she's been growing on her fire escape, at which point I will feel like kind of an asshole.

Week 3: Pasta with sauce not from a jar

And, go!

Week 3: Pasta with sauce not from a jar

And, go!

Apple Fudge bars AKA Chocolate Cake AKA Apple Crisp

Ok, I found a recipe for apple "fudge" bars and thought that sounded great. Well, it turned out to look, taste and feel like chocolate cake with just a hint of apple in it. I had no ingredients for frosting, so it was pointless, I brought it to work and it was devoured.






Next I decided to stick with an old standby and make apple crisp, because I like it and I'm craving desert. This recipe seemed good because of the lemon, but I didn't have lemon so I used my Minute Maid Light Lime Drink. It tasted grreat! The lime made it super tangy and good. I got it from the foodnetwork page, which I like.
6 McIntosh apples, peeled and diced into 1/2-inch pieces
1/2 lemon, juiced
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground or freshly grated nutmeg
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/2 cup flour or fine graham cracker crumbs
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 stick butter
1 pint vanilla ice cream
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. In a 9 by 12 baking dish, combine apples, lemon juice, cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar. In a small bowl, mix flour or graham cracker crumbs, brown sugar and butter together using the tines of a fork and your fingers, working until even, small crumbles form. Sprinkle topping evenly over apples and bake 15 to 20 minutes until apples are just tender and topping is golden brown. Top dishes of apple crisp with small scoops of vanilla ice cream. YUM!

Bite me, apple tartlets

At the pastry shop near my house, you can buy apple tartlets for about $4 each. After making them from scratch last Sunday, I've decided that forking over a few bucks is well worth it!

I found a Cook's Illustrated recipe for apple tartlets online, and they ended up tasting great -- especially the crust, which has a cream cheese base. But the process drove me batty, and I felt like throwing in the towel at several points during the process. Basically, I've learned that pastry dough is a delicate operation, requiring cold dough and limited handling/futzing. Which sort of conflicts with my cooking, um, style.

Anyhoo, the pictures below highlights some of the process that I totally recommend for people who are more patient than me! (Nao and Myrtie, I'm looking at you...)

Here's the lil' food processor, filled with dough. You pulse the dough ingredients until they're nice and sandy.

Mmm. Look at that tasty dough ball. After you form it, you flatten the fucker and slice it into wedges...

And then it's back into the refrigerator. After cooling, you turn these little wedges into disks.


Then it's time for the delightful rolling-between-parchment-paper process. Roll on a surface with some sort of grip/friction, because they can slide all over the place. Feeling almost done? Nope. It's time for more dough refrigeration and apple peeling, coring and slicing.

Finally, you throw the apple mixture on, do your best pinching the edges of the dough to form some semblance of crust, and bake. About halfway through baking, you coat the tartlets with egg whites and sugar. And, if you're like me, this is when you drop a bowlful of egg whites on your kitchen floor. Then clean up the egg whites, while cursing apple tartlets, Cooks Illustrated and the sink full of tartlet-related dishes. Bon Appetite!

Appatoulille

Since I don't have a working oven, and a lot of apple recipes involve baking, finding a recipe this week was a bit of a challenge. Then I turned to the people who know apples best - the fine folks of Washington state.

Although the standard reaction when I said that I was making Apple Ratatouille was, "ew," this recipe intrigued me because I love ratatouille but my tummy hates eggplant. Why not try it with apples as a substitute?

The first thing that I realized about this recipe is that it involves A LOT of dicing. See!


The second thing that I realized is that it makes A LOT of food. Although the instructions pretend like it can all be made in one skillet, I had to transfer it to my big stock pot for the last few steps.


The third thing that I realized is that it calls for way too much salt. To counteract this, I added the liquid that I had drained off of the tomatoes and about double the amount of walnuts. Not only did that cut the saltiness, the extra walnuts really upped the yum factor.

I decided to make it an entree by serving it over cous cous, and I topped it off with some grated parmesan cheese.


In the end it turns out that all of the dicing was worth it. The apples added just a hint of sweetness, but were not overpowering, and the walnuts really made the dish. Yum!

Thank god, because I have a lot of leftovers.