crucible of ennui

As promised – here is the recipe for the Napolitano family meatballs. I usually take a day off and get Christina to do the same and we get 10 times the amount to make a buttload at one time. Then we freeze them and have them as needed. BTW – Christina is a massive wuss and doesn’t like the feeling of meat under her nails. Call the waaaah-bulance.

1 lb Ground beef (30%)
1/4 lb Ground pork
1 cup plain bread crumbs
1/2 cup grated parm. cheese
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1/2 cup milk
1 egg
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/8 pepper
1 tbsp parsley

Let the eggs, milk and meat stand out for a bit to warm up. If you’re working with huge amounts of meat – it gets pretty freaking cold mixing everything by hand. Combine the beef, pork, milk, eggs & garlic. Use your hands to mix this up really, really well. In a different bowl mix the dry stuff together and slowly add them to the squishy meaty-milky-eggy stuff. Get to mixin’ with your hands (f’n Christina always leaves this part to me).

Okay – time to make them balls. Decide on what size you want. I make mine like an inch and a half in diameter. In a hot skillet – olive oil and then brown them on all sides. Mmmm – the broken ones can be eaten right away because they’re disfigured and would be made fun of by the rest of the whole meatballs.

Lasagna filling.

Anyone who uses cottage cheese is just wrong. If you even think of replacing the ricotta cheese with cottage cheese, don’t ever let me know as I will think really bad things about you for the rest of my life. This is enough for one pan.

1 lb ricotta cheese
1 cup grated parm. cheese
1 lb mozzarella cheese – grated
1 tbsp parsley
1 tsp oregano

That’s it. Simple recipe. If you’d like something visually stunning – under the top most layer of noodles, place some thinly sliced mozzarella cheese so when you cut it and pull the piece away ooey-gooey strings of cheese will impress everyone you’re serving.

Every once in a while I’ll cut up some Italian sausage and saute it in red wine then layer that between the filling and noodles.

Again – why am I sharing this. Because I care. And because I keep losing the recipe.

I’m willing to put my sauce recipe up against anything out there. This has been in my family for years. Why am I putting it out there? Because everyone deserves a chance at greatness. My sauce could stop a religious war. My sauce is world peace in a pot of rich red tomato-y goodness. No foolies.

Hokay. This was my Papa’s recipe. Then my dad’s. And now it’s mine. I think we all changed it in some small ways over the years. So this is how it exists today.

1 onion diced
2 cloves garlic (more if you’d like)
1-2 tbsp olive oil
2 huge ass cans of crushed tomatoes – like the ones at warehouse places
2 tbsp parsley
2 tbsp basil
1 tsp worcheshire sauce
4-6 drops Tabasco
1-2 cups red wine

If you like mushrooms, decide how much you want in your sauce, then at the very beginning add them to the oil and start browning them just before you add the onions. Remember not to over cook the onions – just till they turn translucent. So – olive oil, onions, garlic – sauté until translucent. Then add the rest of everything, stir and simmer.

If you’re looking to make a meat sauce – decide how heavy a meat sauce you want. I grew up with heavy meat sauces. The kind that held the spoon suspended upright in the pot. This is a great way to use leftover chicken or steak. Before you put your sauce pot on the stove take your meat and begin slicing it very thin with the grain. Then cut it into strips, about 1 inch long and 1/4 inch thick. Place in sauce pot with olive oil and cook until everything just gets done. Then add the rest of the oil, onions and garlic. Then the rest of the ingredients and simmer simmer simmer. Like overnight kinda simmer. I usually start this in the evening so it can become fabulous overnight.

I’ll post the meatball and lagasna filling recipe later this week.

Mmm… holiday weekends! I love me some 3-day weekends. I took the opportunity on Sunday to really work on the house and cook. I think the best day for cooking was Sunday.

I started with French Toast. And not the wimpy kind made with sliced sandwich bread… I used that thick cut texas toast. I remembered reading in a cookbook a recipe that used orange juice as part of the liquid for the french toast batter. I didn’t want an overpowering orange-y taste, so I grabbed an orange off the tree out back and grated 1/2 the zest into the egg batter dippy stuff. It worked – as the zest clung onto the surface of the bread and the taste wasn’t “ORANGE!”, but “ooo – do I detect a hint of orange?”

Then for lunch we made tuna fish. Oh – not some boring tuna fish. Glenn makes really yummy tuna salad – mayo, mustard and aleppo pepper. Then he took a few pieces of the texas toast (we didn’t use for breakfast) and brushed garlic butter onto 1 side, then pressed it into parmesean cheese. Then he threw that onto the griddle and made tuna melt sammiches!!!! OMG – they were totally delicious. All melty on cheese-y garlic-y toast. <insert yummy sound here>

For dinner we were totally healthy, but didn’t skimp on any flavor. And it was one of those dinners that’s really too easy to prepare. I bought some salmon fillets and Glenn threw those into a little glass dish with butter and then into the oven to bake at 350. I asked him to not season the salmon with anything since I was going to attempt a fruit salsa to put on top. Here’s the salsa!

In a bowl combine:
1 shallot – minced
1 jalepeno – seeded & diced (if you like the heat, leave the seeds)
2 tsp cider vinegar
2 tsp honey
2 tbsp olive oil
stir and let it sit for 15 minutes while you prep the fruit

dice
2 peaches
2 plums

take 1/2 a cup of the peach/plum and mash it in with the bowl of other stuff. Then fold in the rest of the fruit. Maybe throw some fresh chopped basil in with everything too – like 2 tsps.

Done. keep it out at room temp. Use before 4 hours are up or else the fruit gets mushy and icky.

Once upon a time, a proud, old king asked his daughters, “How much do you love me?”

“I love you more than gold and silver” one daughter replied.

“I love you more than diamonds and rubies and pearls,” her sister said.

“I love you more than salt,” answered the third daughter.

The king grew angry when he heard this last answer. “How dare you compare me to something as poor and common as salt?” he raged, and he banished the unfortunate girl from the kingdom.

The details of each story differ, but the end is the same in all. The foolish father is served a meal without a single speck of salt in it. The food is so dull and tasteless he cannot eat it.

Which brings me to my new challenge of low-sodium cooking. A lot of the foods items you can buy to make week-nite dinners easy is pretty much off the menu. Do you have any idea how much sodium is in a serving of flavored rice? It’s out the freakin’ window.

The worst was the turkey bacon. Or as Glenn so aptly put it, Facon. We thought we’d give it a try, I mean, how bad could it really be? It was in the range of acceptable sodium amount per serving (although 1 serving was 1 piece of turkey bacon. Do you know anyone who eats only 1 piece of bacon?). So… it’s texture was kinda weird – like crispy tissue paper. And the flavor - I put a piece directly onto my tongue and my tastbuds did not registered anything there. Seriously. I could not taste it. So that was kinda disappointing.

But I didn’t make some peanut butter cookies with no-salt added peanut butter. They were okay so I brought the rest into work today and they’re already gone.

I wonder if Indian food has a lot of sodium in it….

Here’s a thought. I’m feeling lazy, but I want more of that soup I made this weekend. 

So I’m going to buy 2 or 3 of those roasted chickens from the deli… pick the meat, roast the two picked chicken skeletons and then make the soup from there. 

See…. I’ve cut out the roasting of the turkey and let someone else do it for me!

So all i have to do now is make the broth then the actual soup. 

I’ll still buy a turkey and ask Glenn to roast it for me something in the next week or two… but sometimes you just can’t wait for soup. 

that’s right. I made the bombdiggity soup this weekend. 

Glenn scoffed when I said I wanted to save the turkey carcass from Thanksgiving. But that’s what I used to make the soup.

Take a turkey carcass. 

Roast @ 450 for 15 minutes in the oven. Transfer browned bones to a large stock/soup pot

Add 2 onions, a rib or two of celery – sautee these just a bit
6 cups chicken broth
3 cups white wine
simmer 1ish hour

strain the stock and throw out the icky stuff

to the now strained stock add:
1 cup wild rice mix (I toasted my rice with some butter a bit to break down the tougher outsides of the wild rice)
2 large carrots
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp baking soda (to help cook the wild rice quickly)

simmer for an hour until rice is done. Last 10 minutes of cooking add 3 cups of leftover turkey meat. I added a few handfuls of diced mushrooms I needed to use. 

Finally – stir in 1/4 cup flour into a cup of heavy cream. 
Add flour/cream mixture to the soup and cook until thickens. 10 minutes.

Kinda takes some time, but well worth the effort. 

because it cures m-f’n cancer.

 I don’t know why, but I’ve been on the downside streak of bad cooking. The green bean casserole didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I thought that I’d do it from scratch and follow that neat recipe on Good Eats, but the beans were still underdone and kinda crunchy. And the onion topping was mediocre to horrible (depending on whether I’m in the room or not). meh. I’ll try it again for tomorrow night when Glenn gets home and we have our Thanksgiving, but I’m going with those fried onions out of the can by French’s and maybe even getting frozen green beans so I don’t have to clean and prep 2 lbs of fresh beans again. 

Other than that – it’s been a pretty low-key weekend. Kinda boring. Not wanting to do much of anything. I’m not about to brave the malls or any other retail establishment. I’m just in an anti-holiday type of mood, I guess.

It’s almost Thanksgiving again. I feel bad that Glenn has to work again on Thursday, but I am glad that he’ll be home on Saturday and Sunday. I want to make him something really special and yummy to eat… but the last few kitchen experiments have been less than… savory. 

We got a KICK ASS Kitchen Aid mixer and I had to try it out… so I was thinking cookies. I don’t know how, but I misread the ingredients and doubled the butter and the cookies ended up being just greasy crust lining the cookie sheet. Ew. So then I got all pissed off, determined to make the f’n cookies. I swear I triple checked all the amounts, but they still turned out crappy. I just can’t make cookies. Cupcakes – no problem. Muffins - makin’ em in my sleep. But for the life of me, I can’t make cookies.  Or pancakes, but that’s a story for another day.

Seriously. W.T.F.  

Maybe it’s because I don’t add enough love to the recipe. 

Maybe it’s because I cook with spite.