Espaghetti Esquash

Good luck cutting the guy open. I wondered if just throwing it at a tarp would have been easier and safer. Our esquash was extremely estubborn. In revenge, I scraped out (with a big espoon), all it's flesh and seeds. Its seeds I further tortured with washing, oiling, and salting, and then baking at 300 F for about 15 minutes (stirring every 5 minutes). Yummy!

After my esnack, I eslathered the esquash with olive oil and s&p and baked it at 350 for what was supposed to be 40 minutes (cut side down) and ended up being a secret, due to the fact that oven didn't tell me when it beeped and then kept right on cooking. (The nerve!!!) When you take it out, you see that magic has happened:

You can pull on the flesh and, viola, estrings!

At this point, you can do many things: eat it plain, throw it at the ceiling, feed it to the dog (the dogs in this particular kitchen didn't deserve any...) but I cooked it in some sauteed garlic and leftover tomato sauce (which I was too lazy to post about; sorry) with some sherry. It basically looked and tasted just like regular espaghetti, so I'll have to do this again sometime for further research!

Roasted Tomato Sauce!

Here's one good reason to be crazy about taking pictures of the food you're cooking: when you forget what time something went in the oven, the camera can tell you. Thanks, Giovanni!

So the cool thing about this sauce, with helpful hints from teh interwebs, is that the entire sauce is roasted (meaning you don't roast just the tomatoes, but everything). Normal tomato sauce involves sauteing garlic and onion then adding tomatoes and spices. Normal tomato sauce with roasted tomatoes involves using roasted tomatoes instead of fresh or canned ones. When the whole sauce is roasted, magic happens.

Spread halved tomatoes (romas are best) cut side up in a pan with fairly high sides and cover with a generous sprinkling of minced fresh garlic, dried basil and oregano, salt and pepper to taste, and a drizzle of olive oil (the easiest way not to spill is to pour a bit of olive oil in a spoon and use that to drizzle; even if you dump the whole thing out on accident it's still less than a slip of the bottle).

Roast at 450 for 30-45 minutes (take them out before you see signs of burnage). Blend, either in the blender or in a pot with the imersion blender. Boil some water off it's too thick (mine ended up the perfect sauce consistency).

Mix pasta into sauce over low to medium heat to warm; garnish with fresh basil to serve.

Moosewood Tomato Wine Sauce with Fennel

Tonight's experiment was another miracle in actually following recipes. I couldn't taste the wine at all, though I might not have recognized it anyway. The fennel makes it slightly interesting, but otherwise it's a gentle tomato sauce.

The Moosewood cookbook says to saute 1 c chopped onion, 2 minced garlic cloves, and a sprinkle of salt in warm olive oil for 5-7 minutes, then add 2 tsp ground fennel, 1 tsp dried oregano, and 1 tsp dried basil and cook for another minute. Then you add 1/3 c red wine and boil everything. Add a 28 oz. can of tomatoes pureed (you can buy tomato puree or buy whole tomatoes and dirty your blender) and simmer the sauce for about 20 minutes, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.

Bruschetta & Roasted Zucchini (& Heavy Pasta Estate)

Lesson learned: bell pepper has a nasty way of taking over everything. And unless you're prepared to use too much oil and salt, let the zucchini stay out of pasta. Actually, I think tonight taught me that I should stop trying to put things in pasta besides spices. (I was pretty disappointed with the pasta, so someone please come eat the leftovers for me! If you want to know what I did, leave a comment.) At least I can make food look dang good!

The proper way to prepare zucchini (imho) is as follows: wash zucchini, slice 1/4 slices, place in bowl big enough you can comfortably stir them, with olive oil, salt, and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Put on greased cookie sheet and roast at 450-475 for 10-15 minutes (but watch them in case your oven is different). Devour.

The tomatoes in the photo are the only decent store-bought tomatoes around. They come from Arizona but somehow taste exactly like they're freshly picked from the backyard. They're absolutely mind-blowing. So was the bruschetta I made with them, superfruity olive oil, fresh garlic, and the basil my plant donated:

(I dried out my leftover Italian bread with the zucchini I roasted, it got reaaally dry. The tomatoes softened it up perfectly however, and it was interesting rubbing the garlic cloves (I cut them in half first to use the inside of the cloves) on the very dry bread because the bread was so hard it was like rubbing garlic on a cheese grater. Now I know the best way to make really legit garlic bread!

Bruschetta recipe:
Slice bread, put plain bread on ungreased cookie sheet and bake/roast at 450ish for 10-15ish minutes. When cool enough to touch, paint with superfruity olive oil with a pastry brush (or your fingers). I put the olive oil in a small dish to make it more accessible and to avoid having to pour it (because I would accidentally pour too much). Then scrap bread to taste with the cut side of a (crushed) garlic clove, and top with tomato basil mixture. (Tomato basil mixture = roughly chopped tomatoes, torn fresh basil leaves, s&p&olive oil to taste, refridgerated for a while to marry flavors (I actually used the the freezer to cool it faster). Keep away from you roommates unless you want it all gone very quickly!

One Hot Night (Part 2 - Pasta & Successful Sauce)

 (Isn't it cute! And the knife is my one and only - it can do anything!)

I caught another culprit. (The onion has been behind bars in the sauce-making sense, so we needed some excitement.) The culprit this time is the tomatoes. I am sadly resolving to stop making pasta with fresh tomatoes, because the tomatoes aren't near flavorfull enough. This time I just sauted a bunch of minced garlic in olive oil and dumped in a 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes (I was expecting crushed tomatoes to be analogous to crushed garlic, and was wrong. Now what I need is someone to explain the difference between crushed and purred tomatoes). I added about 2 tbsp of dried basil and 1/2 tbsp dried oregano. Finally my faith in my ability to make Italian food was restored.

And the leftover bread I made last week? Perfetto per facendo la scarpetta!

Fatto!

Friday Night Experiments

What are weekends for? Extra time for kitchen experiments! I'm still in search of the perfect pasta sauce. Tonight it might have happened if someone had reminded me to buy dry basil. The other reason I have to go shopping again is that somehow I bought CRAP olive oil - I tasted a small spoon of it and then a bit of another bottle's oil and the one I bought today (because it was cheaper...) tasted relatively tasteless. Very sad. Horray for more shopping! If only I were in Italy and could buy olive oil at the farmers' market tomorrow!!!

In happier news, the tomatoes were the best store-bought tomatoes I've ever had. I was skeptical at first because the package said they'd been packaged more than a week ago, and they came from Arizona. Tomatoes from Arizona? I stand corrected. They tasted like I had actually picked them off the vine in my backyard!

Experiments today involved sherry for the first time. I took a tiny spoonful of it too and found it surprisingly strong and sweet; moreover I wished I had white wine because my extreme lack of knowledge about wine says white wine would be better.

The tomato sauce ended up being very light - good for summer but disappointing (everyone else who tasted it was impressed) because of the lack of spices. There was a blending basil win, however. And I am getting better at mincing garlic :). I had to suck it up and buy a $4 pound of peeled garlic because peeling garlic requires turning off the fan (or the paper blows everywhere) and turning off the fan isn't really an option.

Recipes:

Nice light summery tomato sauce: Saute minced garlic (I think I used seven cloves) in extra virgin olive oil for a few minutes, then add half a medium-sized onion. Cook for a few minutes and then add the tomatoes. Cook for 5-10 minutes then turn off the heat, put about half the tomatoes in the blender, and add the tomato puree back to the pan. Turn the heat back on and add 1/4 tsp oregano, 1/4 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, and a few turns of the black pepper grinder. I made the mistake of dumping in a bit of cooking sherry which made the sauce too sweet in my opinion (a friend said she one of the the things she liked about it was that it wasn't too sweet, so just adjust to you taste). After a few minutes of heavy boiling to reduce the sauce, I put a bunch back in the blender on a higher speed because the sauce was still too thin. (In the end it was always too thin; I think tomato paste intervention might be necessary.) During the second blending, I added five large (as in 4"!) fresh basil leaves to the tomato sauce in the blender. Next time: No onion, more garlic, loooooots more basil, no sherry, and back to the tried and true 3 tbsp. dried basil and 1 tbsp. dried oregano.

QuinoaSherryBroccoli Experiment: Saute minced garlic in extra virgin olive oil, then add small pieces of cooked (or almost cooked) broccoli florets (you get to eat the stems while you cook - don't throw them out!) and a generous unmeasured amount of cooking sherry. Watch sadly as it immediately evaporates. Add more sherry, turn off the heat, and continue talking with hungry friend while sherry soaks in. Turn heat back on, on LOW, and stir while everything gently cooks. When the voices in your head say so, add cooked quinoa. I probably used about 1.5 cups, but I didn't measure. Use however much is appropriate for the amount of broccoli you used slash however much is appropriate for the number of people you are trying to feed slash however much is appropriate for how hungry people are. Stir and cook for a few minutes to let the flavors marry and get nice and warm and happy. Feed to your hungry friend. Hungry friend will be impressed. :) Kudos to my sleepy brain for this fantastic idea. Next time: use another kind of wine. Donors, anyone?

P.S. While you cook: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ige8G7qpEF8