I grew up eating lots of pasta dishes with red sauce, maybe because Mom knew they were meals no one would complain about, and she had three notoriously picky eaters to contend with. Over the years, I’ve experimented with different ways of making tomato sauce, from using canned ingredients to starting with whole tomatoes. Regular tomatoes, when puréed, are way too watery and take forever to reduce to a sauce. But this year, I tried using smaller tomatoes such as cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes, and I got awesome results with little effort.
cooking in the pan
Sprouts puts these tiny cherry or grape tomatoes on sale every now and then, in one-pint containers. This sauce uses two pints, plus red onion or shallots (chopped), a bulb of garlic (peeled and chopped), dried rosemary, a dash of cumin, sea salt, freshly ground white & black peppercorns, and serrano peppers (chopped). I used three serranos, and the sauce was way too hot, so one pepper would be sufficient unless you enjoy breaking into a sweat and having a runny nose while eating.
top view of cooked mixture in a container to be puréed
In a large pan with a generous amount of olive oil, sauté the onions, garlic, and peppers until soft, add the whole tomatoes and seasoning, and reduce the heat to a simmer. Stir often. When the tomatoes get super soft, you can smash them for fun, but don’t do it too early or you will spray hot tomato juice all over the place and end up hating life.
side view of cooked mixture waiting to be puréed
That’s about all there is to it. The final step is to purée the mix with an immersion blender. You end up with about three cups of sauce. Of all my tomato sauce experiments over the years, this one is my favorite, and I’ve made it three times in the past couple months.
If you slice a potato thin enough and deep fry it, you’ve got potato chips. Pan-fried potatoes are a hearty alternative that doesn’t require a vat of hot oil.
I sliced half a Russet potato and fried it in a mix of olive oil and coconut oil. Medium low to medium heat is best. (On my electric stove, where burner controls are marked 1 to 10, I used 3.5 to 4.) I’ve found that too high a heat tends to burn the oil or even burn the potatoes before they are cooked all the way through.
This method uses less oil than deep frying, but you still want enough oil in the pan to cover the slices. Just look at them bubbling away!
I prefer cooking them until they are mostly a light golden brown. The thinnest slices get crispy like a thick potato chip, and the thickest slices are still cooked all the way through.
I lay the slices out on a big plate and sprinkle them with whatever seasoning sounds good. For this batch, I used ground peppercorns, sea salt, and dried rosemary. But you could use dill or chili powder or any spice you like. I served mine with a dollop of hummus and some sliced pepperoncinis.
The following photo doesn’t show the whole batch. I started eating them while the last slices were still cooking. Too yummy too wait for!
Since it’s hard to identify chunks of stuff in a photo of a soup or stew, today you get a photo of unprepared ingredients!
This series of posts about cooking was first imagined as a way to chronicle my crock-pot experiments, but after several culinary successes, I realized I hadn’t kept any pictures. No one wants to read a food blog without seeing the food, so 2018’s first “concrocktions” must wait until I feel like making them again for picture time.
Ingredients: 1.7 pounds of sweet Italian sausage, a jar of mushroom pasta sauce, a whole bulb of elephant garlic (peeled, with cloves chopped in half), a red bell pepper and an orange bell pepper (roughly chopped), a yellow heirloom tomato (roughly chopped), some black and white peppercorns, and enough chicken broth to cover it all.
I cooked a smaller batch without the veggies and garlic a week before, intending to serve it over pasta. But it was so good, I just ate the sausage and sauce on their own! That first batch was made with hot, not sweet, sausage, and there’s no reason you couldn’t add some heat to this concrocktion.
Cooking: This batch was larger than the previous two, and it took about five hours on high in the crock-pot. At three hours, it was maybe cooked, but not all the flavors had blended, and the peppers were still too crunchy. About half an hour before I was done, I added uncooked pasta.
The chicken stock does thin the red sauce, but the combined flavor is intense enough to be worth it. In my second attempt at this dish, I learned I could throw a small amount of uncooked pasta into the crock-pot about half an hour before the cooking stops. The pasta soaks up excess liquid for a hearty dish with fewer pans to clean.
I almost got it right last time, but not quite. This time, I added maybe 6 to 8 ounces of a pasta I’ve never noticed before: orecchiette.
The orecchiette needed 45 minutes on high to cook, and I could have let it go an hour. It remained al dente and did not turn into the creamy mush that overcooked pasta can become in a crock-pot. Also, I used less pasta this time to avoid making the broth too starchy. Think about the starchy water you pour off when you boil pasta, then realize that starch is now in the crock-pot broth. So, be careful.
Taste Review: This was the best of my three attempts at this kind of dish, with a balance between rich sauce, meat, pasta, and vegetables that practically melt in your mouth. The picture above is after I already ate two bowls and was going back for a third!
This concrocktion has one foot in the world of stew and one foot in the kind of Italian food I’ve loved all my life. I served it in a bowl, but most of it you can eat with a fork. I originally thought I’d pull the garlic out for something else, but the cloves had turned super soft and broken apart, and since all the flavors are blended in the sauce, the garlic bites aren’t overpowering at all. The tomatoes and peppers are almost dissolved into the sauce, but the pasta and sausage are hearty and substantial. Good blend of textures, and super tasty.
Usually I blacken catfish, but fillet of sole was on sale. Why not try it with that pack of Ramen I picked up on a whim? And of course, toppings.
Prep:
I soaked the fillet of sole for about an hour in a marinade of one take-out packet of soy sauce and an equal amount of juice from my jar of pickled jalapeños.
While that sat, I ground a pile of black pepper onto a plate, and added an even bigger pile of chili powder, then stirred that together.
Also, I got my pans ready, because the fish and Ramen will cook super fast, and that’s no time to be fumbling with pans. I put water in a small sauce pan for the noodles, and olive oil in the frying pan for the fish. Don’t skimp on the oil; it keeps the fish from sticking to the pan.
Cooking:
When I was ready for the fish, I got the water boiling, and heated the oil in the frying pan to medium heat. “Blackening” can turn into “burning” very quickly, so it’s best to not be too aggressive with the heat.
I put the fish one piece at a time onto the blackening mixture and gently but thoroughly coated each side, then set the fish in the hot oil. This is no time to dawdle, because fillet of sole is a delicate cut of fish, and it only takes a couple minutes on each side to cook all the way through.
The water was boiling, so I dropped in a whole pack of Ramen. The noodles finished at almost the same time as the fish. I drained most of the water and added ½ to ¾ of the flavor packet. (I wasn’t making broth like the Ramen instructions say to, so adding the whole packet to mostly dry noodles would make them way too salty.) Stirring in the seasoning was easy because the noodles were still wet and steamy.
Serving:
Spread the noodles on the plate, and set the fish on top. I heated nacho cheese sauce and sprinkled on diced jalapeños, with a light drizzle of red hot sauce. (The pile of green stuff in the photo is quinoa pesto I was taste-testing. It’s good on its own but totally wrong for this dish.)
Taste Review:
I wasn’t expecting to be blown away by this inexpensive concoction, but it was all kinds of awesome. More sensitive palates could dial back the saltiness and spiciness by using less of the flavor packet and not garnishing with jalapeños. The Ramen was perfect for this, but you could make a deluxe version with angel hair or fettuccine pasta. This dish could probably feed two if it included a side.
Of all the meals posted this month, this one was the closest to ecstasy, but also the most painful, because I burnt the ever-loving shit out of my finger while making it. It all started when Sprouts put nearly a pound of Alaskan cod on “manager’s special”, and I thought, “Isn’t that what British pubs use for fish and chips?”
Marinating the Fish.
I cut the cod into five pieces and soaked them in the juice of one Persian lime mixed with one take-out packet of soy sauce. I don’t know what’s special about Persian limes other than that they were on sale, and the ones I bought were seedless, which is convenient. The fish marinated in the fridge for about an hour while I worked on everything else.
The secret to great mashed potatoes is realizing the potatoes are merely the vehicle for flavor. Potatoes are neutral, like blank pages in a book. Your mission is to write a flavor masterpiece on those pages.
I started with roasted garlic butter. The last time I made garlic butter, it didn’t have enough garlic flavor for me. This time, I upped my game. Instead of regular garlic, I roasted two entire bulbs of elephant garlic, which is convenient because of the bigger cloves (which means less peeling).
Roasting garlic is easy: get rid of all the papery skins, chop off the hard tops of each clove, rub the cloves in plenty of olive oil, and bake them at 350F. The bigger cloves in elephant garlic take a little longer to get completely tender compared to the smaller cloves in regular garlic, around 20 minutes.
While the garlic cooked, I melted a stick and a half of unsalted butter in a sauce pan on low heat.
I also chopped a gigantic Russet potato, peeling and all, and boiled it until it was super tender. This potato must have weighed a pound or more; it was a real beast. It ended up in 32 small chunks so it would cook quickly, which took about 20 minutes. When the potato was tender, I drained off the water. Easy stuff.
Right about the same time, the garlic was tender and smelling so good! I removed the hard skins from the cloves and used an immersion blender to puree the garlic and butter together. That’s it. Now you are a garlic butter expert.
I poured off half of this butter mix for later meals, then combined the remains with the potatoes, a generous pour of half-and-half (not milk, you savages—get some cream in the mix!), a splash of sea salt, a sprinkle of dried rosemary, and an “Italian blend” of grated cheeses (parmesan, romano and asiago). I pureed it all with the immersion blender, pouring in some more half-and-half when it seemed too thick for my little blender to handle.
The result was so good that I could have stopped right there and just eaten mashed potatoes for dinner.
The Topping.
It’s not my revolution if I can’t put toppings on it. I didn’t want boring brown gravy (though I do love that), so I made a chopped veggie topping by dicing a Roma tomato and a bit of red onion. I added diced, pickled jalapeños for heat and color, and a generous heap of dried rosemary. I shook it all up in a plastic container so the rosemary would soften a bit in the veggie moisture.
The Fish Fry of Doom.
I made a breading by whisking together flour, chili powder, black pepper, and sea salt. I suspect the “flour” was leftover waffle mix from last year, in an unmarked container. But waffle and pancake mixes are mostly flour anyway, so why not? I worried this would screw things up, but the breading tasted great.
I love coconut oil, but olive oil is better for a fish fry since it has a higher burning point. Once the oil heated up in my frying pan over medium heat, I started coating the fish chunks in the flour/spice mix and placing them in the pan.
Here’s where I fucked up. When setting the fourth chunk of fish in the pan, one of my fingers dipped into the hot oil with it. I suggest you don’t repeat this step, because I’m typing this three hours after I finished my meal, and if I take off my ice pack for more than five seconds, my finger screams like a motherfucker. So, unless you really enjoy physical pain that will give you the vocabulary of Samuel L. Jackson in a Quentin Tarantino movie, I have a suggestion for you. Put the goddamned fish in the motherfucking pan using TONGS!
Chalk this up to lessons learned. It’s difficult to cook fish, photograph it, eat it, and type one-handed. Somehow, I held my ever-so-manly pink Hello Kitty ice pack on my finger, reduced the heat a little on the fish fry, and flipped all the pieces once. They came out perfectly, and I saved three of the five chunks for leftovers.
I can’t tell you how many times this Hello Kitty ice pack has rescued me from total agony.
Serving.
Fish and potatoes on a plate! Drizzle with some of the still-warm garlic butter and the diced veggie topping, and dinner is ready! Ice Pack Optional!
Taste Review.
This may be one of my top ten tastiest meals of all time. The fish turned out great, despite the medical emergency in the middle of frying it. The improvised veggie topping surprised me by being the perfect flavor bridge between the fish and potatoes, without traditional gravy. I’ve made mashed potatoes many times, but it’s been a few years, and this batch made me fall in love with them all over again. I’ll send you a postcard from our honeymoon.
In the spirit of injury-induced profanity which informed this post, my potatoes would like you to know that, bitch, they ballin’!
Sprouts put a package of three bratwurst-sized pork sausage links on sale, so I scooped them up for another creative culinary experiment. Yes, there are sausages hiding in this photo! What can I say? I like toppings.
Prep:
Rinse about ¾ of a bunch of spinach (minus the stems) first and thoroughly drain the water. The water needs time to drain before adding the spinach to the mix later, so you don’t get an explosion of popping grease when water meets hot oil.
Cooking:
I did this all in one frying pan, as usual. I browned the sausages on one side in coconut oil over medium to medium-high heat. After flipping them over and browning the other side, I pulled them out of the pan, sliced them in half lengthwise, and laid them out in the pan so the (former) inside was directly on the pan’s surface. This browned more surface area and sped up the process of cooking the interior.
When the sausages were fully cooked, I pulled them out and put all the spinach in the pan without removing any of the oil or melted sausage fat. Fat equals flavor, and we aren’t counting calories here.
I added two generous scoops each of canned black beans, diced pickled jalapeños, and fire-roasted salsa. Cooking over medium-high heat boiled off some of the liquid to thicken the mix a bit. (I worried this level of heat might harm the flavor, but it didn’t.) After a few minutes of occasional stirring, the spinach was fully sautéed and ready to pour over the sausages.
Serving:
Top with freshly ground black pepper, and it’s good to go!
Taste Review:
Unseasoned pork sausage is a bit bland on its own, but this dish made it part of a flavor explosion! The result reminded me of a rich gumbo, but with a much shorter cooking time. It might be even better if the sausage meat were first removed from the skins and cooked on its own, crumbling it into bits and stirring in the rest of the mix as it cooks. With three sausages and this topping, I could easily feed three people, so I saved 2/3 of this dish for later.
I never ate Yukon potatoes before, but the little ones at Sprouts looked so cute that I had to take a couple home for something special. Why not a spicy twist on an old breakfast favorite? Why not slather them with so many tasty toppings we can hardly see them?
Prep:
I put two Yukon potatoes in a sauce pan with cold water and a dash of sea salt, then boiled them for no more than five minutes. I ran them under cold tap water to cool them down, and shredded them along with two serrano peppers. I ground some black pepper into the mix and a generous amount of chili powder, then mushed them about into four little patties.
Cooking:
I fried them in a skillet with coconut oil on medium heat. They were browning a little too fast, so I reduced the heat to medium-low and flipped them.
While they cooked, I took the mouth of a small jar and cut out circles from slices of Colby Jack cheese, and set the circles on the patties to melt.
Serving:
I topped them with a drizzle of chipotle ranch dressing and sprinkled on some more chili powder and black pepper. A little scoop of diced, pickled jalapeños in the center completed the presentation.
Taste Review:
Delicious and enjoyably spicy, but they could use a touch of sea salt in the patty mix for flavor. This batch turned out slightly mushier than the crisp perfection I envisioned, so I’d consider frying them in a lot more oil to get that deep-fried vibe. Olive oil might be better than coconut, since it can take a slightly higher heat. Overall, they tasted great, with a little room for improvement in crispiness.
Swordfish has a meatier texture than many fishes, more like a steak, but I find the taste a bit bland. Since the manager at Sprouts put out a half-pound chunk of swordfish at a steep discount, I improvised an intensely flavorful marinade to liven things up.
Marinade:
A spoonful of sun-dried tomatoes with a splash of oil from the jar.
A spoonful of diced, pickled jalapeños with a splash of liquid from the jar.
The juice of one fresh lemon.
One take-out packet of soy sauce.
I cut the chunk of swordfish into quarters, like four mini-steaks, and marinated them about 90 minutes in the refrigerator.
Cooking:
All the fish and marinade went into a frying pan on medium-high heat, hot enough to boil the marinade. I ground a generous amount of fresh black pepper onto the fish, flipped it once, and ground more pepper on it.
Then I added a pile of chopped spinach leaves to the pan. I let the spinach and marinade cook about a minute longer after I pulled the fish out, so the liquid reduced and thickened, a bit like a sauce.
Serving:
After scraping all the saucy spinach goodness onto the fish, I sprinkled it with sunflower seeds and even more pepper, and added a dollop of hummus on the side.
Taste Review:
I wanted intense flavor, and I got it! More sensitive palates might prefer less lemon juice. More adventurous palates might desire more jalapeños. A half-pound of swordfish is more filling than I expected, but this was a delicious meal—and a lot cheaper and easier than it looks!
This October’s witchy brew was my first home brew: a gallon of mead. At less than 30 days from start to finish, it came out sweet, clear, strong, and absolutely delicious. Cheers!
At first, it was too cloudy and, because I had tried to jumpstart it with extra yeast when I thought it had stopped fermenting after a week, it tasted way too yeasty. But I watched a video on clarifying it with bentonite clay, and that method cleared it right up by pulling out the offending yeast particles.
It goes great with homemade cinnamon-sugar donuts made from deep-fried buttermilk biscuit dough straight out of a can. Couldn’t be easier.
No black cats this month, but here’s a black guitar. This road-worn axe from 2000 was feeling sad, so I stripped off her hardware, taped up the neck, and sprayed her with flat black auto touch-up paint. Oddly, the sound improved once I had her back together.
Then I tried my hand at more mountains, but with a spacier vibe. Here they are in progress, while waiting on a coat of highlights.
October 31 is a good day listen to Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. Enjoy!
