Tag: Tomato Sauce

Easy Year-Round Tomato Sauce

January 9, 2014February 7, 2017

Over Christmas, my sister Emily was raving about this tomato sauce on Smitten Kitchen that I’d seen several times. For some reason, it never really stuck out to me. It’s almost too easy.

But for New Year’s Eve we were having some friends over, and I decided to make fresh pasta with homemade sauce. Knowing full well that I wouldn’t be able to find incredible fresh tomatoes, I decided to give the recipe a shot. And you know what? It was awesome.

I did a few things differently. Firstly, I doubled the recipe. I probably could have still only used one onion, but I used two. Instead of just mashing the tomatoes against the side of the pan, after removing the onion I used an immersion blender to slightly puree the sauce. I’m not a huge fan of chunks in my tomato sauce, so it was a personal taste thing. I also added some chili flakes for a bit of heat.

Easy Year-Round Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

1 28-oz can of whole, peeled tomatoes, preferably San Marzano (yes, you can taste the difference)
5 Tbl unsalted butter
1 medium yellow onion, peeled and halved
Red chili flakes
Salt

Instructions

In a heavy bottomed saucepan, combine butter, tomatoes, onion, and a pinch of red chili flakes. Choose a pan bigger than you might think. The onions can be a little unwieldy while stirring as they’re in such big chunks. Over medium heat, bring the sauce to a simmer, then reduce heat to maintain that simmer. Cook for 45 minutes, stirring every once in a while, and smashing the tomatoes against the sides of the pot (be careful not to squirt all over yourself here). Remove onions from sauce, turn off heat, and, if you’d like, use an immersion blender to lightly purée the sauce. If not, that’s ok too. Season to taste. Use sauce to dress your favorite pasta (homemade or otherwise), or in a lasagna or on pizza.

Lasagna, of the cheesiest variety

October 22, 2013February 5, 2017

Lasagna // Serious Crust by Annie Fassler

Sometimes you need to make those meals that yield a million servings so you can eat it all week. The week before the CD release concert we had for Jonah’s new album was absolutely one of those weeks.

We had a few guests staying with us, band practice almost every night, and I had work on the nights I wasn’t rehearsing. It was a busy time, to say the least. So the night of our Kickstarter team meeting, to discuss merch and social media, etc. I made this lasagna, so that we could eat it throughout the week. It was high up on the list of best lasagna I’ve ever made. What made it so good? The homemade sauce, the homemade noodles, and some absurd amounts of cheese.

I’ll admit, however, that this uses a lot of dishes, and has a fair amount of ingredients. But when you’ve got some time and you’re making a meal that will carry you through the week, it’s worth it. I like to think of it as an entire week’s worth of mess (and cleanup).

Cheesy Meat Lasagna

Note: I used a 13×9 inch baking dish, and filled it right up to the brim. I put a baking sheet underneath it to catch any overflow (which was minimal), but still, if you’ve got a slightly bigger baking dish, it might be a good idea to use it.

Ingredients

Noodles

3 eggs
2 cups flour

Meat Sauce

Olive oil
1 medium white onion, chopped
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
3/4 lb ground beef
3/4 lb ground italian sausage
2 cloves garlic, minced
salt, pepper, other Italian seasoning (parsley, basil, oregano, to your liking)
1 12 oz can tomato paste
1 28 oz can crushed (or diced) San Marzano tomatoes (yes, these are expensive, but I found it to be terribly worth it, and they weren’t THAT MUCH more than the other brands)

Ricotta Filling

3 cups ricotta
2 eggs
1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper

1 cup freshly grated parmesan
2-3 cups (preferably freshly) grated mozzarella

Instructions

Noodles

In the bowl of an electric mixer, or using a bowl and whisk, or a bowl and fork, mix up the eggs and flour into a dough. If it’s too wet, add more flour 1 tsp at a time. If it’s too dry, add water 1 tsp at a time. Dump the dough out onto floured surface, knead a few times, and wrap in plastic (or put in a bowl and cover with dishtowel) and allow to rest for 30 minutes.

Meat Sauce

In a large pot, heat 2 Tbl olive oil over medium heat, and add the onion and carrot. Cook until starting to soften. Add the garlic, beef, and Italian sausage, and cook until the meat has browned. Add 1 tsp of salt, 1/2 tsp ground pepper, and whatever other spices you’d like (I did 1/2 tsp dried basil and 1/2 tsp dried parsley). Add the tomato paste and canned tomatoes to the pot (no need to drain them!) and stir to combine. Turn the heat to low and cover, letting it simmer for ~30 minutes.

Ricotta Filling

While your dough is resting and your sauce is simmering you can whip up the ricotta filling. In a bowl, combine the ricotta, eggs, pepper, and 1/2 cup of both the grated mozzarella and parmesan. Store in the fridge until you’re ready to assemble your lasagna.

Roll out your pasta into sheets for lasagna and set aside, covering so that the noodles don’t dry out. Preheat your oven to 375 degrees and lightly coat your baking dish with oil. Spread ~1 cup sauce in the bottom of the dish. Here’s how you’re going to do this: noodles, ricotta, sauce, cheese. That’s your order. On top of the sauce in the bottom of the dish, arrange a layer of noodles; spread 1/3 of the ricotta mixture on top, then 1 cup sauce, and sprinkle with cheese (a mixture of the mozzarella and parmesan). Do that twice (now we’ve got sauce, noodles, ricotta, sauce, cheese, noodles, ricotta, sauce, cheese), and in the next layer, leave out the cheese (so just noodles, ricotta, sauce). Put another layer of noodles on top, spread the rest of the sauce on top, and sprinkle with the rest of the cheese. Phew! If you don’t feel like following my layering instructions, just do whatever you want. It’ll probably work, and you’ve probably eaten enough lasagna in your life to figure out how it works.

Bake the lasagna for 30-40 minutes, rotating it half way through, until the cheese on top is melted and turning golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to cool/set for 10 minutes before serving. Enjoy!

Using those roasted tomatoes…

July 13, 2012February 4, 2017

Remember those roasted tomatoes I made a while back? 2 things about them.

One is that I’m reading Molly Wizenburg’s book, called “A Homemade Life,” and it’s lovely. She’s a fabulous writer, and there are recipes! I can’t wait to try them. I already loved her, but then I got to the part where she talks about her own roasted tomatoes, and how great and easy they are, and now I feel like we may be soul mates. Oh my goodness. Read her blog Orangette and also the book mentioned above. She’s working on another book, and I can’t wait to read it. Her writing is really lovely, full of nostalgia and a clear love for detail. She notices the little things.

The second thing about those tomatoes: pasta sauce. They’d been sitting in the fridge for a little while, and I thought to myself, “I won’t let these go bad! I must use them!” So I decided to do something easy with them besides just eating them cold. I threw them in the food processor, heated them up, and put them over some sauteed mushrooms and onions to make a sauce. Scoop the sauce over some noodles of your choice, and sprinkle with freshly grated parmesan and voila! Dinner. You can find the original recipe for the tomatoes here.

Polenta Torta with Eggplant Sauce

February 9, 2012February 2, 2017

Last weekend, our friends (and newlyweds) Sophie and Johnny were in town. Sophie and Jonah were housemates senior year of college, along with the lovely Maureen (Mo). So we invited the three of them (Mo, Sophie, and Johnny) over for dinner for a little reunion. Mo is a vegetarian, so I immediately went to “Plenty,” that vegetarian cookbook that we are quickly falling in love with. I found a recipe for some eggplant sauce, to be served on top of sweet corn polenta. Alas, it is not corn season, so I decided to use the eggplant sauce to make a polenta torta (recipe found in Alice Waters’ “The Art of Simple Food”). It was a really simple dish, and while we didn’t execute it to the best of our abilities (our dish was too big which made the layering hard) it was still very good. The mozzarella brought a nice pop to the dish, and was really stringy which I love. The eggplant sauce, as I said above, was nice and creamy. It was kind of like a layered pizza, except no crust, just polenta.

Polenta Torta with Eggplant Sauce

Ingredients

Eggplant Sauce

2/3 cup vegetable oil
1 medium eggplant, cut into 3/4 inch pieces
2 tsp tomato paste
1/4 cup white wine
1 cup chopped peeled tomatoes (we used canned, and I ended up using the whole can just to yield a little more sauce)
6 1/2 Tbl water
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp sugar
1 Tbl chopped oregano

Polenta

4 cups water
1 cup corn grits (polenta)
1 tsp salt
3 Tbl olive oil
1/2 cup parmesan cheese (freshly grated)

Polenta Torta

4 cups polenta (hopefully the above recipe yields 4 cups… we didn’t end up measuring)
2 cups tomato sauce (or in this case, Eggplant sauce)
1 cup parmesan cheese (freshly grated)
1/2 pound (2 medium balls) fresh mozzarella

Instructions

Eggplant Sauce

Heat the oil in a large saucepan, add the eggplant. Cook the eggplant on medium heat for ~15 minutes, or until it’s soft and nicely brown. When the eggplant is cooked, drain as much oil from the pan and discard it. Now add the tomato paste and stir it into the eggplant. Cook for about 2 minutes, then add the wine and cook for another minute or so. Now add everything else (tomatoes, water, salt, sugar, and oregano) and cook for another 5-10 minutes to let the flavors deepen. You probably want to keep the pot covered so the sauce doesn’t cook down too much. On the other hand, if it’s looking a little too liquid for your liking, cook it uncovered so it can cook down a little bit. At this point, you can set this aside until you are ready to use the sauce. I made this sauce the morning of the meal, and actually left it on the stove, covered, for many hours.

The great thing about this sauce is the creaminess that the eggplant brings to it. When eggplant has been cooked this long, it kind of falls apart, and I love it when that happens.

Polenta

Now, I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t cook the polenta. Jonah did while I was getting in my workout at the bouldering gym. So I’ll relay what he did to you, but I don’t have any insider tips because I wasn’t there. But here’s what he did: Boil the 4 cups of water in a saucepan. When it’s boiling, whisk in the corn grits and the salt. Now, turn down the heat and whisk until the polenta is suspended in the water and no longer sitting on the bottom of the pan. Cook for 30 minutes – 1 hour (the longer the better, according to Alice Waters), stirring occasionally. Don’t let the polenta get above a low simmer. If at any point the polenta seems to be getting too dry, add a little water. Once the polenta is all cooked, add the olive oil and parmesan cheese.

Polenta Torta

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Oil a baking dish (like I said, ours was too big, so keep this in mind when picking what dish to use), and spread 1 1/3 cups of polenta out over the bottom of the dish. Over the polenta, spread half of the eggplant tomato sauce, then half the mozzarella cheese, and sprinkle half the parmesan cheese. Repeat: spread 1 1/3 cups polenta, the other half of the sauce, mozzarella, and parmesan cheese over the dish. End with a layer of the polenta. Because our dish was too big, we only did one layer, which was ok, but it didn’t look as nice as it could/would have if we’d done it right.

Once it’s all layered up, you can put it in the oven for 30 minutes, or until it’s hot and bubbling. Allow to cool for a bit before serving and eating. Enjoy!