"marinara" news and stories

We've still got a few months until peak tomato season, but a basic tomato sauce can be made year-round with good-quality canned tomatoes, which are a requirement for any well-stocked pantry.

Ripe summer tomatoes. Photo: The Ewan, Flickr.

In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.

When I was a kid, the end of the summer brought with it a painful, unpleasant tradition. Every August, when the farmers' market was filled with tomatoes, my parents would buy a few bushels, and the whole family would spend a couple of days blanching, peeling and processing the fruits. Every time, the process resulted in clothing and skin that reeked of tomatoes, fingers that stung and a freezer full of watery tomato sauce that we would defrost throughout the year.

As an adult, I have continued the tradition, although I make my sauce in the fall, when cooking pleasantly warms and perfumes the house, rather than turning it into a sweatbox. I also prefer using canned tomatoes, rather than fresh ones: In addition to sparing my fingers from burns, they produce a sauce that is richer, more flavorful and has a better texture than my parents' marinara. On the other hand, I still use my mom's recipe, which she learned from her Italian godmother, although I add a little bit of red wine vinegar, which gives the sauce more depth. Ultimately, it's a spicy, fennel-accented marinara that freezes well, tastes delicious and is inexpensive to make.

Get the recipe for all-purpose marinara after the jump.

Tired of boring pastas with just one sauce? Add another, or two!

When I was first contacted by FiberGourmet to try their fettuccine, I have to admit I wasn't really expecting anything all that different - after all, it is just pasta, right? Well, yes and no. The product itself is a lower-calorie version of standard pasta which, as I understand it, uses a reduced amount of flour that is supplemented with dietary fiber. In fact, there are only three ingredients in the pasta - durum semolina flour, modified wheat starch, and vital wheat gluten - with the addition of just tomato paste or spinach powder in the flavored varieties.

Since I received a sample package that included each of the three types - original, tomato, and spinach fettuccine - I wanted to try the pasta served several different ways to see what worked best, so I gathered up a group of people, sauces and accompaniments, and got to work. (Continued after the jump.)

Source

The folks over at Details magazine have assembled a slideshow entitled "Orgasm or Excellent Marinara?" Each frame features a cropped photo of different person with a rather suggestive expression. Advancing to the next frame reveals whether or not that person is a Food Network host or a "porn star." The first frame of the show is included here, and the glasses are a bit of a giveaway. There are about 15 different faces in all. Bear in mind that while this is pretty funny, seeing people like George Duran (Ham on the Street) and Paula Deen in this ecstatic context can be a little strange. The real porn star faces are kind of unsettling as well. This might be NSFW. If you'd like a slightly more academic approach to pornography and the Food Network, there's this.

[Via del.icio.us]