I read other food blogs from time-to-time although I’m generally more inclined to devote my blog-reading time to blogs about Garfield. There are a lot of really good cooks out there. I actually haven’t been cooking that long, strictly speaking. So I thought I’d talk about why I cook and why I’m writing about it since I probably don’t know much more about it than you.
I mean one time when we were kids, my sister and I decided we were going to make pizza, and in the absence of the actual ingredients that go into pizza, we used bisquick, ketchup and tomato paste, and American cheese. And we ate it. But we also watched our tape of the “Cabbage Patch Kids Christmas Special” so many times that not only do I have every line of dialogue committed to memory, I also have every commercial that was on the tape burned into my brain. Sometimes, I find myself humming to myself “K-Mart, we’ve got it, and we’ve got it good!” Half of everything I say is actually a “Cabbage Patch Kids Christmas” reference. What I’m saying is, my sister and I may have possessed lower standards than most people, so I wouldn’t recommend trying to recreate our pizza recipe.
My first year out of college, my roommate Steve and I actually lived for a month on this giant bag of wild rice his parents gave him and instant coffee. For the dinner rice, we would add Sriracha hot sauce. By the time I got to grad school, I would make dinner that consisted of a piece of fish on the Foreman grill, green beans sauteed in a dry pan, salt, and maybe pepper. I would actually invite people over for that.
I didn’t really start cooking for real until I moved in with Elizabeth and my reason was this- we worked it out that whoever didn’t cook dinner had to do the dishes. Elizabeth cooked dinner every night, so I did the dishes every night. Doing the dishes is the worst. You’ve already eaten, maybe you’ve had a couple drinks, the weather’s nice out on the balcony or everyone’s in the living room talking or something good is on tv. People will hang out and talk to you while you’re cooking, but you’re on your own when you’re doing the dishes. So I decided I needed to have some dinners I could make.
There was an article in the Times about the way people make roast chicken in different countries and I used to work at a rotisserie chicken place, so I knew a little bit about chicken so I started making roast chicken. And I really messed it up a lot. At first I was so afraid of undercooking it, that I would leave it in the oven forever. Then I would overcompensate and really underdo it (although I just saw Anthony Bourdain eating at this place in Japan where they were serving that chicken medium-rare, like the cross-section of the breast was maybe a centimeter of white and all the rest pink, so maybe that’s ok?). But then, I remember one time I just nailed it. I was eating that chicken and I was like I couldn’t get a better chicken than this anywhere in the city. I could get a chicken that was different and equally good, but this chicken is as good as anyone’s. And that was a really awesome feeling.
So, I started cooking more. Then when Elizabeth got pregnant, she wasn’t up for a lot of cooking, so instead of making dinner some nights, I made it almost every night and I started branching out and grilling different things and braising and roasting and making veggies was besides just steaming them and trying to think up ingredients that would be interesting and think up things that would be good together and imagining what wine I wanted to serve with what and going to the farmer’s market and the butcher and getting excited because there was something I’d never made before. And it’s still hit and miss. Like I can’t really get fish right. And I was totally excited to do a post about pork kidneys, but then I made them and they were a disaster.
Elizabeth is a pretty accomplished baker and she can make complicated things like samosas and onion tarts and her pizza doesn’t involve bisquick. She can actually teach you things, even if you know what you are doing. I’m just someone who can crank out a pretty decent dinner who couldn’t a few years ago. So that’s what my posts are about- something simple that will taste good that you can definitely make, because I can make it and I haven’t been at it long.
Anyway, you may have noticed there haven’t been a lot of posts lately. That’s because E and the baby have been out of town and I’ve had a tough time getting excited about cooking for one. You already know how to make a baloney sandwich. But tonight I actually made pasta with tomato sauce and we don’t have a recipe for that yet, which is weird because we eat it all the time.
This isn’t going to be a recipe so much as it is a general guideline because our tomato sauce depends on what we have in the house. My rule is that if it something I might plausibly find in an Italian restaurant, I can throw it into the tomato sauce. I would always look at what I had in the pot and think it was going to be too thick and add some of the juice from the can, but you really just have to trust that the tomatoes are going to break down. It’s too soupy if you add the juice. The ingredients are: a can of tomatoes, salt, pepper, and some combination of sausage, ground beef, leftover braised meat, anchovies, capers, olives, mushrooms, red wine, garlic, onions, peppers, basil, thyme, oregano, etc. Throw it all in there.
Tomato sauce with plausibly Italian ingredients:
-Can of tomatoes
-Salt and pepper
-Whatever else you have that might be found in an Italian restaurant
– If you’re using meat and/or chopped onions or peppers, go ahead and brown that on medium-high in whatever pot you’re going to use for the sauce. When it’s brown, drain off most of the grease.
– While that’s going, open the can of tomatoes and drain off the juice.
– Turn the heat to low.
– Take the tomatoes out one by one and crush them over the pan with your hand. Really hold them low in the pan when you do this because juice will squirt everywhere and make sure you really crush them up good.
– Add salt and pepper.
– Throw in whatever else you’ve got.
– Let that go for awhile. The longer you can let it go the more the tomatoes will break down and the better it will be.
– Serve it over pasta.
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