Techniques, recipes, and tips for good home cooking. Also, an ever expanding list of things you can make yourself instead of buying at the store, with instructions.
This is the perfect thing to do with end of summer tomatoes and it only takes a few minutes. After you broil them you can freeze them or use them right away and it is dead simple. We usually buy the "ugly" (1.50/lb.) tomatoes at the farmers' market. Any kind will do. Preheat the broiler on your oven. Core and slice in half up to 3 lbs. tomatoes, leave the skin on (unless you don't like it, then take it off.) Arrange the tomatoes skins side up in a casserole pan or deep baking dish, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Put tomatoes in oven on the center rack and broil until golden brown on top (about 15-20 minutes, but check on them.) At this point you have delicious broiled tomatoes that make a 15 minute sauce taste like you simmered it for hours. We make these on Sunday and use them on weekdays. Enjoy!
This is why I'm hot, I don't got to rap I can make a mil saying nothing on a track....
That's kind of how I feel about weeknight dinners sometimes. Ok maybe minus some of the boisterousness, plus we always need to do some work... But the point is that it's possible to put out banging meals on a weeknight with very little effort, which is almost the same thing as making a million dollars for not saying anything....
Anyways what I want to talk about here is always having semi-prepared foods around. No I don't mean packaged stuff you buy from Trader Joe's, but items that you partially put together on weekends or whenever you have time or feel inspired, then keep around in the fridge. This allows you to cook meals in 20 minutes that taste like they take hours. This is the key to making killer weeknight dinners.
Here are some things you'll often find in our fridge and freezer:
Marinated veggies: Blanch or roast veggies like carrots or peppers. Cook them until barely soft, then put in a jar with salt and cover with olive oil. If you're feeling fancy add a little vinegar or a clove of garlic. These are great additions to sauces.
Pesto cubes: at the end of the summer when we rip up our basil plants we make a huge batch of pesto, then freeze it in ice cube trays. A cube of this stuff can do magic to many dishes, or just be used with pasta.
Stock cubes: homemade stock, frozen in ice cube trays, are crucial. Thinning a sauce? Deglazing a pan? This is good stuff to use.
Marinated tofu: you'll find it a lot easier to make tofu tasty if it's already marinated in your fridge.
Cooked beans: I guess you could just stock canned beans, if you don't mind your beans mushy and metallic tasting. But the dried ones are so much better (and not as much of a hassle as many think; more on that in a later post). I like to cook them until they're just barely tender to allow for better control over their texture when I'm using with them later. This is a great habit to get into on sunday afternoons: prepare a pot of beans to use throughout the week.
Cooked grains: whenever you cook some grains, why not cook twice as much as you need? Keep the rest in your fridge, and it's ready to go for next time.
Chopped up leftover meats: let's say you do some grilling on the weekend, and there's a couple of chicken drumsticks leftover. Take the meat of the bone, chop it up into little bits, and keep it around. Now it's ready to go into stews, soups, sauces, frittatas, whatever...
There's plenty more options of course. Anything you use that's not on the list? Hit up the comments!
Now to come full circle, I'll leave you with this pretty hot remix of the song quoted at the top:
The folks over at Ideas in Food come up with some pretty crazy stuff. They probe, deconstruct, and examine food in ways I would never think of. Case in point: this recent post about pasta. They figured out that you can leave pasta to soak for a while in cold liquid, and then cook it like fresh pasta by just dropping it in a hot water for a minute.
This brings up a couple of questions:
Most immediately, how can we use this technique to create new and delicious things? Soaking in chicken stock or tomato broth immediately come to mind....
But thinking bigger for a moment, what else do we prepare unthinkingly that could be done in new ways? What else could we do differently to open up new doors?
Here's a quick tip to add a little something to quick simple pasta sauces: crack and egg over your hot pasta before you add your sauce.
The idea is to add a little creaminess, a little luxuriance, to your dish, but without rendering it heavy. This can bring a simple pasta with, say, olive oil, garlic, herbs, and cherry tomatoes to the next level.
Here's how you do it: when your pasta is ready, strain it and quickly return it to the pot (or to a separate bowl). Crack an egg over the pasta, and mix it in vigorously. The result should be a kind of airy creamy sauce (it should not be little bits of scrambled eggs). This essentially is the technique you use to make carbonara: add a bunch of cheese and bacon and you've got that dish. But add instead some veggies sauteed in olive oil, and finish with just a touch of parmesan, and you've got a brilliant summer dish: light and delicious, with just the slightest hint of decadence. Try it with ripe bell peppers, or with shredded zucchini brightened with lemon.
One more advantage of this technique: it does great things to whole wheat pasta, which I don't normally love.
Here's my current favorite way of using this idea. It hardly seems like it necessitates a recipe, but here it is. Use about 1 egg for every 1/2 pound of pasta.
Heat water for pasta. Add pasta when water is boiling.
Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a skillet and chop a bunch of garlic. Cook (along with some dried hot pepper, if desired) until garlic just turns golden.
Add in a splash of white wine, a couple tablespoons of the pasta water, some salt, and let cook for a few minutes. Add fresh herbs just a couple minutes before the pasta is done.
When pasta is ready, quickly drain, return to pot, crack an egg over the pasta, and mix vigorously for about 30 seconds. You should have a light, airy creamy sauce.
Add some halved cherry tomatoes and the garlic/oil/herb mix and toss all together.
Finish with a little parmesan and some fresh ground pepper, and serve immediately.
Sangria often sucks. In fact, I don't think I've ever encountered a red wine sangria I've really liked. Red wine seems to me to lack the brightness, the vitality, to make a good summer drink. Add that to the fact that most seem to think you should use the crappiest wine you can find to make the drink, and you've got a recipe for disgusting.
White wine, sangria, on the other hand, can be truly excellent. With higher acidity levels, less tannins, and generally less volatile components, white wine lends itself much better to this type of drink. I remember a version from a cuban restaurant in Portland (Pambiche) called the Palm Beach Cooler. I can't recall what exactly was in it, but it definitely involved lime and fresh sugarcane. That was good stuff: delicious, refreshing, vivacious, it was everything a summer drink should be.
So this summer I've set about refining and perfecting a white wine sangria of my own, working off a recipe Lindsey originally used. This drink is brightened with lime juice, sweetened with ginger ale, and fortified with rum, creating a kind of Cuban/Caribbean flavor profile (I told you that palm beach cooler has been on my mind...). Then you add in whatever fruit is fresh and on hand (often peaches for me) and serve it over ice. I've dubbed the drink El Veraniego, which translates roughly to something like "the summery one".
A note on the wine: as you might have gathered from what I said earlier, I don't believe in using crap wine to make sangria. Boring wine, sure. Bad wine, no. The things you add in might mask some off flavors, but using bad wine will still make an inferior drink. Conversely, any subtleties of a good white will be lost, so don't bother using anything too nice. Dry and unremarkable is ideal.
El Veraniego
1 750ml bottle of decent dry white wine
10 oz. (1 1/4 cup) ginger ale
4 tbsp. (1/4 cup) rum
2 tbsp. (or more, depending on your wine) fresh lime juice
Fresh fruit, cut up
A few crushed mint leaves (optional)
Combine all ingredients. Let sit all together in the fridge for an hour or two.
Sorry for the interruption in the posts for a while there folks, but traveling got in the way... I'm back now (though Lindsey is off in Switzerland), so you can expect semi-regular posts.
Now that it's July, I am happily drowning in the summer goodness of tomatoes. They're coming in all colors: red, obviously, but also gold, purple, and even black. We are getting a serious bumper crop in the garden this year, and I'm loving it.
It is hot here in Carolina in the summer. So when you haul in plump, fresh tomatoes from the yard, you have the twin objectives of 1. preserving the deliciousness of the fruit, and 2. not killing yourself by standing over a hot stove for any length of time. Luckily, these two goals come together beautifully in the quick tomato sauce. How delicious the quick tomato sauce can be - when made right (which is not very difficult) and with peak fruit - cannot be overstated.
Really it should be called a tomato-olive oil sauce, since the oil is almost as important here as the tomatoes. It is the key to the luscious mouthfeel of the sauce, to the almost silky texture you get as the tomatoes break down.
As for the tomatoes, you can use almost any kind, but I think what works best here are meatier ones. We've been growing German Johnsons this year, and I find these work exceptionally well.
So there are really just
three key things to remember here:
1. Don't overcook (not hard when it's really hot) 2. Use only really fresh, really ripe tomatoes. Your sauce will only be as good as your tomatoes are. 3. Don't be shy with the olive oil.
Now you can strip this recipe down even further if you want - really, the bare bones are simply oil, salt, and tomatoes - but this is how I like to do it, with copious amount of garlic.
Pasta with Quick Fresh Tomato Sauce
Heat water for pasta in a pot.
Chop up a head of garlic (seriously) and heat about 1/4 cup olive oil in a large skillet on medium-heat. Add garlic, and cook until it just starts to turn golden.
Add a splash of white white wine, let it cook off for a minute, then add 1.5-2 lbs. roughly chopped tomatoes. Salt, and crank the heat up to medium so it gets bubbling vigorously.
Meanwhile, add a pound of pasta to your boiling water (I recommend penne). Your tomatoes should cook for about as long as your pasta: 10 mins.
Drain the pasta just a little before it is done. Return to pot, add with tomato sauce, and put on low heat, stirring to mix everything together. Cook for 3 minutes.
Finish with a little parmesan, and consume with a bottle of chilled white wine.
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