First I assembled my ingredients for the sauce. (This is not typical. Usually I get a few things and go for others as I need them.)
Front row: crimini mushrooms, two cloves garlic, one onion, one green pepper one pound hamburg.
Second row: 24 oz. (680g) jarred spaghetti sauce. mild paprika, ground pepper, Beau Monde Seasoning (celery and onion flavored salt) dried thyme, 6 oz. (170g) tomato paste
Third row: red wine, olive oil, dried oregano, dried basil
Not pictured: small jar of dried chervil.
The expectation is that this will give me my meat and vegetable course for three meals, which is why I use a whole onion, a whole pepper, so many mushrooms, and a pound of meat. I could use leeks instead of onion, and ground pork or lamb instead of beef (which would lead to using different herbs).
Pepper and onion, sprinkled with oregano, paprika, and beau monde, sauteeing lightly in olive oil.
Next I minced the garlic and added it and let it cook briefly, but not brown. I seasoned the hamburg with thyme, paprika, and chervil.
Veggies pushed aside, hamburg beginning to brown.
I added the mushrooms, chopped and sprinkled with chervil, to the hamburg and continued to cook until the hamburg was all cooked. Then I mixed everything together and added more of the herbs and spices.
The mixture.
Next I added a few tablespoons of wine. Then it was ready for the tomato paste.
The mixture after the tomato paste was added and sprinkled with basil.
Then I added the jarred sauce and more basil, and maybe oregano, thyme, and paprika.
The result.
Now all I needed was a vehicle for the sauce. Sometimes I use rotini; sometimes I use regular thin spaghetti. This time I chose whole grain spaghetti. As always, I cooked 76 grams (about 2 3/4 oz.)
The pasta.
The pasta cooked, drained, and plated.
The pasta covered with sauce. Grated cheese for sprinkling (but I always take a few tastes without the cheese, and I leave an bit without cheese to have at the end)
Dinner!
I had plenty of sauce left over, of course, and I divided it into two portions of 488g (17 1/4 oz.) each. So I'll get two more dinners from it. I'll probably spice one up with hot paprika and the other with curry powder.
Now I have to go and fix some baked stuffed haddock.
As always, you can click on the pictures to enlarge them. You'll get a bit more detail, but you'll also see that they're a bit blurry. I'm not sure if that's because I took them with my iPod or because the light wasn't good enough, or what.
3 comments:
Great photos, at least in the size shown in the post. Almost had me salivating! heehee.. I think you're correct about the lighting. The blurriness in enlargements may also have been affected by steam in the area of the stove.
I'm sure I would like that meal a lot. To me it would have been even better if you had made meatballs instead. I like meat sauce, but I LOVE the taste of pasta and sauce alone, and meatballs with sauce alone. It probably is just a result of what I was used to growing up.
Thanks for the comment and the compliment.
When I was growing up, we had spaghetti and meatballs, too — not meat sauce. My mother had a method she learned from my folks' Italian immigrant landlord. Brown chopped pepper and onion in an iron skillet. Add meatballs and cook them. (The meatballs were fairly small. I think she then set the meatballs aside, added the tomato paste and a small can of tomato sauce. Finally swirl spaghetti around the skillet to pick up the sauce. The sauce barely coated the spaghetti and was somewhat bitter, probably because of the high proportion of tomato paste and because the onions got very deeply browned by the time everything was done..
When I started cooking spaghetti for myself, I considered making meatballs, but decided I didn't want the extra step of adding the bread crumbs to the meat, forming the meatballs, and cooking them through. Also I had seen the sauces which begin by simmering tomatoes, and I wanted to have a sauce that was more liquid and plentiful than my mother's version.
So I agree with you, spaghetti and meatballs is good. I just don't feel like making it. LOL
What a coincidence! When I was in the 4th and 5th grades we rented a ground floor apartment in a predominantly Italian neighborhood. The landlord and his wife occupied the 2nd and 3rd floors - they were Italian immigrants who spoke very little English. They had several married adult children and Sammy, their son about my age, all of whom were bilingual. Sammy obviously had to have been a surprise. The mother was close to 50 when he arrived!
Every Sunday morning I awoke to the wonderful aroma of the mother's bubbling homemade tomato sauce! Late in the afternoon she would bring down to us a giant platter of whatever they were having for dinner. It was always unbelievably delicious and enough to feed the five of us.
My mother used store bought sauce, usually Ragu, but she did make her meatballs from scratch - with lots of fresh garlic - YUM! Instead of bread crumbs, however, she used crushed Ritz crackers in her meatballs, which gave them a different taste.
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