Home made Pasta & Scarpetta's tomato sauce

Another home made pasta recipe- this was a bit better than the other one, less egg-y. I also added some dried herbs so there was more flavor. I used the smallest/thinnest setting to make spaghetti, but it clumped up a bit while cooking.

I finally made the tomato sauce from Scarpetta. It's $24 at the restaurant- why not make it at home? I was very skeptical about the amount of oil- it just seemed like it would be an overly greasy sauce. It turned out quite good, but yes a bit greasy. I don't know how they can manage to suspend the oil within the tomato sauce. It was my first time using San Marzano tomatoes (wow they are expensive) and they were very tomato-y even after cooking for half an hour. Often the tomatoes I get, unless I get them from the farmer's market, are taste-less, bland fruits. I'm definitely going to be splurging on a few more can of these great tomatoes.

Roasted Garlic Soup

yummy roasted garlic

I was supposed to make this roasted garlic soup with chorizo, but by the end it was italian sausage, potato, rosemary and roasted garlic soup. It was still delicious, but not exactly what I meant to make. The roasted garlic smells so good, you'll have to stop yourself from eating it. I only roasted 2 cloves because I thought 4 cloves would be overkill, but 2 wasn't enough! I normally roast garlic by the head in the oven, wrapped in foil, but this was faster- you just have to be careful not to burn the garlic.

Like I said, I used chopped spicy italian sausage because I didn't have chorizo and then I added diced potatoes because I have way too many potatoes. Delicious, yes, but maybe I'll actually follow the recipe next time.

Artichoke and Parmesan Risotto

This artichoke and parmesan risotto is a great fall/winter food, incredibly rich and comforting. Except now that I don't have 5 roommates I was forced to eat this for lunch AND dinner for 3 days straight and it was no longer comforting or even good by the third day. so please... make half or find someone to share it with.


I <3 artichokes and I'm starting to like white wine! I don't remember what I bought- I read all the labels at Trader Joe's and chose one that said it was light and went well with pasta.... thank you Trader Joe's -you never do me wrong.

A pizza dough fail.

Yes, broccoli. It was about to go bad and I had to eat it.

Another pizza dough recipe. And this one was a big fail, I don't know why! Maybe my yeast was dead? But this dough did NOT want to be kneaded or be anything other than a chunk of cold, wet dough. I persevered and made one pizza, but I ended up trashing the other two balls of dough. It was sad day in pizza land.

Potato Gnocchi (the 101st? post!)

I had gnocchi for the first time ever while volunteering at Food Rendevous, a great meeting of local food. A chef was demo-ing potato gnocchi and how easy it was to make and I tried some- omgggaahhhhh it was so good. It still had bits of mashed potatoes in it so it was soft, not at all what I thought it would taste like. I've avoided gnocchi for so long because I thought they were going to be chewy lumps of dough- that's definitely not the case! This recipe is great- the gnocchi were tender and had a very faint hint of potato.


I also got to use a potato ricer for the first time and I am now a converted ricer-lover. It make the potatoes so fluffy! This recipe was somewhat labor intensive, I spent just under an hour rolling and cutting the gnocchi. I youtube'd a lot of videos on how to properly roll a gnocchi on a fork... I think they came out more or less looking like proper gnocchi.

I served mine with a meat sauce (Trader Joe's spicy Italian sausage!) YUM! This would be perfect for the rainy weather in socal right now.

Dirty Risotto

Risotto was another one of those mysterious Italian dishes that I've had at restaurants, but never made at home... until TODAY! This recipe for dirty risotto is from Giada De Laurentis, who I am big big fan of (no matter how much she smiles and enunciates every syllable).

It starts out looking pretty bland and ordinary. What good can come of rice + pancetta + bell peppers? But when you add in the chicken broth, slowly and keep stirring- magic happens. It plumps up and the starchy rice and chicken broth make tasty happen.

I had a bunch of leftover pancetta and sausage leftover so I diced the rest and fried it with onions and potatoes to make some dirty hash. Pancetta is my new favorite.

Double Tree Cookie and a Brussel Sprout Pizza

I had no idea Double Tree gave out cookies when you check in until Joanne told me and she says they're good, like one of the best (I don't remember their exact ranking...). I haven't had the chance to stay at a Double Tree yet, but I found this recipe online which is supposed to be the real thing. They were.... okay. I think I had too much stuff for the amount of dough- they were bit crumb-ly and dry. I really like the shredded oats though, I haven't seen/tasted that in a cookie before. Next time, I'm using 3/4 of the "stuff" and keeping the same amount of dough.





And another pizza- I am slightly obsessed with pizza right now (pizzas are the new burgers) and I really really want a brick oven in my backyard when I (if I ever) own my own home. This time it is a brussel sprout pizza. The original recipe is brussel sprouts and pancetta, but I substituted peas since this was on a veggie night. I really like brussel sprouts on pizza- the leaves are crisp and charred and soft when stuck half in, half out of the cheese.

Zucchini Cakes and Mushrom and Herb Polenta Triangles

I had leftover zucchini from the chocolate cake in the previous post so I made some zucchini cakes. It's basically like making latkes, but with zucchini instead. The parmesan was overwhelming, so I will use less of it next time. This is a great way to use up extra zucchini.


I'm enamored by polenta. It's amazing how delicious corn meal and water can be. This time I made mushroom and herb polenta squares. So. Tasty. If you don't like mushrooms, try substituting sundried tomatoes or just using herbs. This is also a good way to use up extra polenta and to experiment with textures. I tried to get fancy with the plating, but it's just on top of arugula, my current favorite salad.

smoothing it out into a flat sheet to rest in the fridge.

By the way I used my dad's Nikon D70 for these photos.... on auto because I don't know how to use it. Can you tell the difference?

Sausage ragu and polenta and whole wheat pizza

This was my first time eating and making polenta and ragu. I wasn't too excited about polenta when I started making it- it looks like sand in water for the first few minutes. Then it plumped up into a creamy mass, sort of how I imagine aligot to look like in person. I loooveeee polenta now and it's so easy to make and really really cheap! I have the standard corn meal from Ralphs and it tastes great. I use chicken stock and some milk to have some extra flavor. I also made some polenta triangles with leftover polenta (a later post...). By the way rouxbe.com is a great site for beginning cooks who really don't know how to cook or chop. Their videos are really helpful and even if you don't get the paid subscription you can still access a good part of their website.


Whole wheat pizza! Surprisingly still pretty tasty, but definitely only for a Neapolitan style pizza. The dough was pretty good, but not great. Once it's baked to a crisp, it doesn't really matter if you use whole wheat or all purpose flour (to me at least), but if you want to have some chew to your crust I would skip it. I made a standard cheese pizza and topped it with arugula, my new favorite salad staple.

Bolognese

Again, only an iphone photo. This recipe is for a bolognese (meat) sauce. There are a lot of different ideas about what a "traditional" bolognese sauce is- even carbonara is heavily debated. Wikipedia says "The traditional recipe, registered in 1982 by the Bolognese delegation of Accademia Italiana della Cucina, confines the ingredients to beef, pancetta, onions, carrots, celery, tomato paste, meat broth, white wine, and milk or cream." The recipe I used is fairly similar.

It's a very hearty, slightly greasy sauce that tastes better the longer it's cooked.

Wild mushroom lasagna and chicken enchiladas

This is that delicious, heavy, rich wild mushroom lasagna I mentioned earlier. It's... amazing. It's also different from the other lasagna's I've made- no ricotta. This is more like making a gratin. Thankfully there is some tomato to balance out the whole milk, but you probably won't get past the first slice.


This recipe for chicken enchiladas is great- no sour cream sauce! It was easy to assemble and pretty fast to make (except for simmering the chicken...). My first time making enchiladas and it was a big success. I didn't have pickled jalapenos so I used fresh ones- I'm starting to get the hang of chilies.

Spinach Lasagna Roll Ups

This is yet another variation on lasagna. I really love pasta + tomato + cheese. I don't even like cheese, but I like it in pasta. I want to say this is healthier, but I have no idea. It has spinach and ricotta, but no heavy cream sauce so I guess it's a bit better than the wild mushroom lasagna I'll post later on.

Somehow they don't unroll themselves.

That Simple But Amazing Tomato Sauce Everyone Raves About

Not really knowing how to name this post, we'll just jump straight into the goodies. Listen up folks: this is seriously one of the simplest, easiest recipes ever. Grabbed the recipe from here: http://smittenkitchen.com/2010/01/tomato-sauce-with-butter-and-onions/

It's literally 3 ingredients. 3! Tomatoes, butter, and onion. Measurements:
1. Two 28 ounces canned, whole peeled tomatoes (I used 2 cans by accident, but the recipe was still awesome ...and healthier)
2. 5 tbsp butter
3. yellow onion, peeled and halved
4? (and salt for #4, if you need it)

And the steps are as easy as 1-2-3:
1. Put all ingredients in the pot to boil
2. Turn down to simmer for 45 mins, meanwhile cooking your choice of pasta
3. Throw out onion & serve with pasta



Even though this was claimed to be the best tomato sauce ever, I just had to add ground beef. I love meat too much!

But I did get a chance to try it without the meat, and surprisingly, I could honestly eat the pasta just with the sauce. It's soooooo delicious!

Can't fathom to throw away the onions? I couldn't either. The Asian-ness in me slapped me around awhile until I succumbed to the calling for no food waste. I ended up chopping the tasty onions up and making an egg scramble/omelet out of it with some chopped ham. :)

Two great meals in one low budget. Enjoy!

Fresh pasta dough for cheese and mushroom ravioli

Pasta dough work station.

I found a pasta maker at TJ Maxx for $16 and I had to buy it. It rolls out dough to 6 different thicknesses and does 2 different cuts (fettuccine and angel hair). I've always wanted to make fresh pasta because it's one of my favorite foods. I used this recipe for the cheese ravioli. Although by the end of it, I had no energy to make the fresh tomato sauce so I used Trader Joe's basil marinara.

The dough, resting.

Some of the comments mentioned that it was bland so I added some white mushrooms and a lot of fresh herbs (thyme, rosemary, chives) and extra garlic. I didn't think that this would make so many ravioli, but it did. AND I had leftover dough so I made pasta. This made several meals.

Trying to place small amounts of filling on the pasta. I should've put half of what I thought would fit (based on the width of the pasta that I rolled out).

Covering the filling.

Sliced (with a pizza cutter) with the air pinched out.

I was going to shape them nicely into squares, but then realized I put way too much filling in so I kept the large ravioli as is. (Note the enormous ravioli at the bottom of the photo.)

My large, irregularly shaped pasta.

I used leftover dough to make pasta when I ran out of the ravioli filling.

Oof, these were hard to pull apart the next day- definitely go heavy with the olive oil if you are making enough for leftovers. The taste is completely different from boxed pasta. It's really silky (and I used all purpose flour! It's probably even better with european 00 flour, it's ultra ultra fine) and very egg-y. So eggy that it was almost like egg pasta. This is not an everyday recipe. It took awhile to roll out each sheet and fill them, pinch all the air out and then slice them, but for a special occasion or for an empty day, very much worth the effort.

Also, you can definitely make these without a pasta roller, but I hope you have strong arms and a whole lotta time to roll out the dough.

Marinara Sauce

My favorite jarred pasta sauce is Trader Joe's tomato and basil marinara. It's the best and so cheap! I haven't had to buy any other type of sauce in years- if I want a mushroom sauce, I add mushrooms. If I want to add meat, I add it myself. I wanted to try and make marinara sauce because it's interesting to learn what work goes into it. And... it looked really pretty on this blog.


I thought since there are so few ingredients that I better use the best tomatoes I could find so I splurged at the farmer's market.


This is how you peel tomatoes- very very easy. Slice a shallow X into the bottom of each tomato and slide them into boiling water for a few seconds. Then take them out and place them into a bowl of cold water (I know, a waste of water...). The skin will peel off super quick and easy. Unlike peeling roasted peppers... which you have to really roast thoroughly and then put under a bowl and tightly cover with saran wrap and then still peel off tiny shrivels of skin with your fingers.


Onions and garlic!

Quartered, seeded and peeled tomatoes + wine (and this is where the quality drops slightly. I don't know my wine and we only had 2 buck chuck so... that went in here) join the party. I let them cook for 2 hours after this photo and things got real mushy. If I had an immersion blender, this would've been a good time to use it, but I do not have one- so I used a potato masher and left a few chunks in there.

I had my marinara sauce with crispy slices of polenta. I got the polenta from Whole Foods. It's packaged like a sausage and I'd never had polenta so I gave this a try. I sliced it as thin as I could and fried them until crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. Coincidentally, the NY Times posted this yummy looking recipe (creamy + parmesan + sausage), which I have bookmarked for the future.

Thoughts? Well jarred sauce is much faster, this took me half a day to make although I left it alone on the stove for the last 2 hours. It tasted very different from the TJ variety, this was intensely savory (umami-y?) whereas the TJ kind is all TOMATO in your face with a hint of BASIL and rather sweet. I'll probably only make this again when I have a lot of time or a lot of tomatoes about to go bad. But an interesting learning experience...

Chicken Parmesan

I stumbled onto the Pioneer Women Cook's blog and found this great recipe for Chicken Parmesan. Her website is MASSIVE. It's not just recipes, there are also homeschooling tips and a self-written romance novel about how she met her husband, Marlboro Man. She was a former city girl and now she's a pioneer woman. She even has her own cookbook!


She posts TONS of pictures- probably one for every step, so it's really helpful for ingredients or techniques that you're not familiar with. I identify with the group of people who are terrified of raw chicken and all it's potentially hazardous bacteria so pounding it in a plastic bag was a great idea. I served mine over a bed of fettuccine. And even though you're making everything from scratch- it comes together very quickly.