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.
Fresh, homemade tomato sauce usually doesn't get the "quick and easy" label. There's peeling, de-seeding, reducing... It's the sort of thing that's well worth the effort, but not always feasible. Or at least, it didn't seem so until now.
This week, Pim has shared a 15-Minute Tomato Sauce recipe that looks super tasty and requires minimal effort and time. It's so quick that even if the steps take longer, it's still not a big investment of your in-demand minutes. This is basically an easy blanch, peel, squeeze, and saute process that results in a fresh-tasting, pulpy tomato sauce that can be whipped up as your dried pasta boils.
I've been cutting down on carbs lately and looking for an excuse to have a big plate of spaghetti topped with sauce and grated parmesan cheese. Hello National Pasta Day!
When I got home from class on Wednesday night, I wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge. I stood there for a moment, staring blankly at the contents, half hoping that there wouldn't be anything inside so that I could just pour a bowl of cereal and plop down on the couch. Instead, there was a bowl of aging tomatoes that demanded to be cooked.
I had bought them over the weekend at my local produce market on clearance, six big tomatoes for $.99. So they were already starting to show signs of wilt when I brought them into the apartment, and 4+ days in the fridge hadn't helped measures much. I brought them out onto the counter, along with a large pan, half an onion and a few cloves of garlic. I got the onion and garlic chopped and simmering in a little olive oil over low heat and turned my attention to the tomatoes.
For those of you not familiar with this Portuguese sausage, it's pronounced Ling-GWEES-a. I was waiting tables in a pizza place about 20 years ago and a tourist asked me what this "Linguicka" was.
It's fantastic in sandwiches and on pizza, but you can also make chili with it. One of the best bowls of chili I've ever had was made with linguica instead of beef. It gives the chili a really nice, different flavor, while remaining hearty. I don't know how this place made it, the exact recipe. I'm sure I could call them up right now and say "hey, give me your recipe," but I don't want to do that, even though they probably remember me coming in there.
According to an old episode of M*A*S*H, smell is one of the biggest triggers of memory that we have. And food smells can take us back to special moments in our lives. Of course, sometimes food just "smells good" and we like it, with nothing deeper attached to it. Here are my 8 favorite food smells. What are yours?
1. Chocolate chip cookies: Mmmmmmm...I would assume that this is on almost everyone's list. Unless you don't like chocolate, which means it would be hard for me to talk to you. Also includes other types of chocolate and hot cocoa.
When I first laid eyes on a Sloppy Joe, I was about 5. I had no idea what it was and my parents had certainly never tried to serve one to
me. A Sloppy Joe is essentially ground meat cooked in a skillet with a tomato based sauce and tastes more like a
chopped up hamburger drowning in ketchup than the pasta-topping meat sauce it is related to. In fact, I'm fairly
certain that the first one I ever had was simply ground meat in ketchup - a combination likely to win the heart of any
5-year-old. Another big selling point was the fact that it made for messy eating, hence the name.
I've been cutting down on carbs lately and looking for an excuse to have a big plate of spaghetti topped with sauce and grated parmesan cheese. Hello National Pasta Day!
For those of you not familiar with this Portuguese sausage, it's pronounced Ling-GWEES-a. I was waiting tables in a pizza place about 20 years ago and a tourist asked me what this "Linguicka" was.
According to an old episode of M*A*S*H, smell is one of the biggest triggers of memory that we have. And food smells can take us back to special moments in our lives. Of course, sometimes food just "smells good" and we like it, with nothing deeper attached to it. Here are my 8 favorite food smells. What are yours?
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