3 posts tagged “spaghetti sauce gourmet”
Last night I was going to make pumpkin gorgonzola pasta but we were out of evaporated milk. It's been cooler outside lately, so I was in a pasta mood. Tuna noodle casserole? Nope, we're out of tuna. (How could we be out of tuna?) What DID we have? We had the makings for orecchiette with pancetta and peas.
This recipe intrigued me, probably because it called for saffron. The only thing I knew about saffron was that it was a very expensive spice that turned things orange and I think they use it in Spanish cooking? Looking it up online, I understand why it's so expensive. Saffron threads come from crocuses (croci?). Each crocus has a couple of the red saffron threads and it takes about 150 crocuses to yield one gram of saffron. Wow. Now I know why it's so expensive. Not at Trader Joe's, apparently, because I think I was expecting to pay an arm and a leg and my 1 gram bottle wasn't that expensive.
Now that I'm thinking about it, most of the makings for dinner came from Trader Joe's- the alfredo sauce, the pancetta and the saffron. You'd think the orecchiette would have come from there too, but I had to do some searching for that and found it at Mal*Wart, of all places. The peas? Grocery store.
This was another of those "5 ingredients or less, 15 minutes or less" meals and again, they didn't lie. While waiting for the water to boil I chopped the pancetta, then cooked it with the saffron while the pasta boiled. Normally when I drain pasta, I have one of those little hand drainer things that you hold against the pot, but every time I'd tip the pot and shake it, I'd get more water out. I ended up having to go and get the colander out because some of the orecchiette, which is shaped like little ears (hence the name), suctioned itself to the sides of the pot. I'm used to shells, which you can shake the water out of with no problem. I'm not entirely certain why you had to fry the saffron with the pancetta, but it did dye the alfredo sauce a pale yellow when I added it.
Normally when you add the sauce to the pancetta, you would add the peas, but the Husband hates peas so I did those in the steamer and just added them to mine. I tasted the pasta, sauce and pancetta, then I tasted the finished product with peas added in. I think it was better with the peas- the peas not only gave it a bit of color, but their sweetness cut through the almost too salty pancetta. That made me worry. How would the Husband just like the sauce, meat and noodles without that buffer there? Unfortunately, for him it's a texture issue, so no dice getting him to eat them. I had my dinner with a glass of viognier- Saint someone from Trader Joe's, and in case you're curious yes, I do buy all my wine there- and it went pretty well. The first time I had a glass of the wine I thought it had a little too much of an afterbite but it went really well with this dish. I think I need to take a wine class, though, because when I looked up viognier it said that it goes well with spicy dishes, strong flavors and fresh fruit. Well, maybe the pancetta gave dinner a strong flavor?
When the Husband got home I explained what dinner was. He was enthusiastic about it, mainly because the kitchen smelled like cooked pancetta. I warned him that I thought dinner needed the peas to balance the flavor. He enjoyed dinner, but agreed that it was really salty. His thought was that maybe next time I make it, I add some pearl onions to his. Interesting thought. I think they'd probably do what the peas did for me, except for giving it color. Hm.
Final say- we'll be doing this one again. It'll be interesting to try adding pearl onions and see what the Husband thinks of how it effects the taste. Recipe number three gets a thumbs up.
A couple weeks ago, I posted about a recipe I made from this cookbook I picked up and was falling in love with, the Spaghetti Sauce Gourmet. This time we tried the bowties with chicken and mushrooms.
This recipe, like the last one, came together quickly. It wasn't a 15 minute recipe, but I think it was done in under half an hour, which is still a bonus, and it was made entirely from things I had in the pantry, which is a double bonus since we're broke this week. You boil the pasta, and while that's going you brown some chicken tenders that you've salted and peppered. Once those are done you take them out and put in mushrooms and minced garlic and brown those, then add dry white wine and cook it down. Once that's cooked down you pour in a jar of alfredo sauce and put the chicken back in- I sliced the tenders into skinny pieces- and warm it up, then serve it over the pasta. Easy cheesy, literally!
Getting down to details, I used canned mushrooms this time because I didn't have any fresh, although next time I think it'd taste even better with fresh. I also didn't cook the mushrooms quite so long because they were canned, so the mushrooms and the garlic weren't quite brown. At one point during dinner, the Husband asked, "Did you put nuts in this?" because he'd found a bit of minced garlic that looked like a tiny piece of chopped nut. I think next time it's fresh mushrooms and let that and the garlic brown more. Usually I buy Ragu alfredo sauce, but all I had last night was Trader Joe's alfredo and wow. It was super tasty. Ragu alfredo is kind of like the Campbell's soup equivalent- it's thin and kinda watery, where the TJ's alfredo is thick, creamy with a little bit of texture to it and has this great flavor. I think it's also about the same price, so you know what I'm getting the next time I'm there, which is usually every Saturday. As for the wine, I tend to cook with cheap wine (sorry, Ted Allen!). I had a bottle of Livingston Cellars Rhine wine that I don't even remember buying in the back of the fridge, so that's what went in. According to the web site, the wine is crispy and fruity, which is not really the dry white I should have put in, but hey, it's what I had. The recipe also suggested sherry. Surprisingly, I don't think I own any sherry. I probably should make the investment, given how often I cook. I served this with green beans and a glass of Vinho Verde, and I find it amusing that when I looked at the entry for the last recipe I made out of the cookbook, I served that with green beans and Vinho Verde as well.
So far, it's been two super tasty recipes out of the Spaghetti Sauce Gourmet and we're willing to call it $20 well worth spending. We can't wait for the next one!
A couple weeks ago, I picked this book up from the library. Real reason I picked up the book? Because the tomato sauce parts of the cover are squishy, and that is cool. The whole premise of this book is that there are four basic sauces out there- tomato, pesto, alfredo and cheddar, and you can either make your own or you can use stuff from a can, but there are a lot of tasty, quick and easy things you can make with those four sauces. As I started looking through it, I noticed that about 95% of the recipes did sound really good. I realized that this was probably going to be something I'd want to own, so we went to the bookstore and picked it up the very same day. Last night, I finally got to make something from the book. Yay!
Last night's dinner was Hungarian pork cutlets in creamy paprika sauce. I had some pork cutlets in the freezer- only three, when it called for six, but that really wasn't a problem. Basically you saute some minced onion, then sprinkle the cutlets liberally with paprika and brown them. You add a jar of alfredo sauce and, because we're mushroom whores, I added a can of mushrooms and then you let it simmer until the pork is cooked. In our case, I let it simmer until the egg noodles I made to go with it were done cooking. Whole thing seriously took 15 minutes. You know how Rachael Ray says "This dinner will only take you 30 minutes!" and then you're still cooking and it's been more like 45 because you didn't go to culinary school and you're not a knife skills whiz, or because you're a lazy whore who didn't wash her produce when you got home or because you insist on taking 10 seconds to go to your trash can because you find the idea of a garbage bowl repugnant? This recipe had the whole super easy designation, with a note that it was 5 ingredients, 15 minutes and they didn't lie. Biggest time consumer? Cooking the pasta. I also did some green beans to go with it and had a glass of Vinho Verde from Trader Joe's. Side note- I remember buying a bottle of Vinho Verde at Trader Joe's when I was there with J and S and J asked me, green wine? Is it really green? No, but it really has a green grape taste.
The Husband loved dinner. It took a lot of convincing and a Klondike bar bribe to make him not go back and devour the remaining cutlet, and this got his vote of approval to make again. It also made us really excited to try other recipes. One down, 159 to go!
