Simple Tomato Sauce

I hadn't heard of this recipe before it appeared on Smitten Kitchen, but it's apparently kind of a big deal in the food blogosphere.

This is incredibly simple, and you probably have the ingredients sitting in your pantry already.  They are:  tomatoes, butter, and an onion.  That's it.  No chopping (although I ended up cheating and using a blender at the end.)  It makes a wonderfully rich, mellow sauce that reminded me a bit of vodka sauce, but without the bite. 

Chicken Parmesan

This is probably not a weight-watchers approved recipe (chicken! breaded! and fried! with cheese!), but is a delicious week-night treat.  If you pound out the chicken cutlets beforehand, this takes about a half hour start to finish but tastes like it required hours in the kitchen.   

Adapted from How to Cook Everything.  Full disclosure:  I did not make my own bread crumbs or sauce.  It was still awesome. 

Fast Sausage Ragu, now with less weird coloring!

The fast sausage ragu from Bitten looks much prettier if you use white wine instead of red.

It gets rid of the green eggs and ham problem-- the food is now the appropriate color.  You should, however, rinse out the measuring cup you use for your wine before you put milk in it, otherwise the milk curdles ever so slightly, which you will not notice until you stir it into the rest of the sauce.  It's still delicious, though. 

The wine used here was Woot Cellar's Triacipedis.  They have consistently delicious, reasonably priced wines.  Plus amusing descriptions.

Polenta with Zucchini and Ragu

I love it when leftovers come together to make something different and delicious.  I already had leftover polenta and sauce, so it wasn't a huge leap to put one on top of the other and add cheese.

Still, this was fairly different from and actually more filling than just sauce on pasta.  Admittedly, my attempt at frying up polenta resulted in more of a blob than the neat wedges I was going for, but it was still quite tasty.

Fast Sausage Ragu

This turned out really well; I was a little leery of putting milk and tomato paste into the same sauce (although it's amazing with cream, so why not?), but it was fantastic.  And it only took about 20 minutes, start to finish.

For all that I keep wanting to color-correct this photo, the sauce did turn out purplish, since I used red wine instead of white... but I needed to open a bottle anyway, for the next day's stew.  Hence, purple sauce.  C'est la vie... it was delicious.

Scallops for Heather

Once again, scallops over spinach over orzo. But different... this time with a white wine and Parmesan cream sauce, which was even better than it sounds. Also better than it looks-- it's hard to take a decent picture of mostly beige food in a dark room.


I need a better name for this, possibly, but I made this for my sister's birthday. We had a ridiculously fantastic bottle of champagne (it was a present) and I wanted to eat something equally spectacular but complimentary.

I'm trying to write this down from memory (I would've taken better notes if I'd known it would be so delicious), but I put it together with a recipe from Cooking Light (ha!) and the general idea of some sort of white wine sauce, which turned into a cream sauce just because I had heavy cream in the fridge. This sounds a little complicated, but if you have everything prepped before you start messing around the stove, it should take about 10 minutes.

Heather's birthday scallops
(serves 3-4)
1 lb. sea scallops (12-16; there should be 3-5 per person, depending on how big they are)
1/2 box of orzo
bag of spinach
a whole lot of butter
a bunch of olive oil
3 shallots, diced
2-3 cloves of garlic, diced
1 c. fresh parsley, snipped
1/4 c. heavy cream
1/4 c. grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 c. dry white wine

Boil water for pasta; start chopping everything into little bitty bits. Set scallops onto paper-towel lined plate; grind pepper and sprinkle a bit of coarse sea salt over the top. Flip them over; repeat.

Once your water is boiling and you have everything chopped and ready to go, start cooking pasta and heating heavy pan over medium heat, generously coated with a tablespoon or two of olive oil. When oil is shimmery, saute garlic, shallots, and half the parsley. Remove the mixture a small bowl. Add more olive oil and 1/2 T butter. Put half the scallops and remaining parsley in the pan; cook for 2 minutes and flip (tongs are extremely helpful.) Cook for another 2 minutes, then remove to plate and cover with foil to keep warm; repeat with the other half of the scallops. Do NOT overcook the scallops; it's easy to do and then they get all chewy.

Drain pasta; leave in colander for now. Deglaze the scallop pan with most of a glass of white wine; pour into empty pasta pot. Bring to a simmer; whisk in cheese and half of the shallot mixture. When cheese is melted, whisk in cream and another tablespoon of butter. Bring to a simmer; stir in pasta.

Meanwhile, put the rest of the shallot mixture, a splash of wine, and the spinach into the scallop pan. Stir until the spinach is all wilted. Add a little salt and pepper.

Plate with a layer of pasta, then a layer of spinach, then 3-5 scallops on top. Sprinkle with any parsley that's left and a couple of grinds of pepper. Serve immediately.

Shrimp sort-of-carbonara

This is a somewhat lighter take on a carbonara-type pasta; I subbed Canadian bacon for regular bacon, stock for cream, and used zucchini instead of some of the pasta. It turned out to be SO yummy... the dog was disappointed because the plates came into the kitchen pre-licked. (No company was present.) Also, as I'm writing this out, it sounds complicated but actually took only 15 minutes (25 including chopping/ prep time, with the caveat that I already had stock made and frozen)


Ingredients
1/2 lb. shrimp, shelled
1 zucchini, sliced or julienned
1/4 lb. pasta (I used fettuccine)
1/3 c. stock (I had chicken in the freezer, so that's what I used-- shrimp would be better...if you shell the shrimp ahead of time and simmer them in a really small pot with the the ends of the onion you're already using, you conveniently have all the ingredients, and you were just going to throw them away)
1 small onion or a couple of shallots, diced
kernels from 1 ear of corn
3 slices Canadian bacon (yes, real bacon would be good, too), julienned (cut into small sticks-- can you julienne meat? Somehow, you only hear about carrots)
splash of cream
1/4 c. grated Parmesan cheese
Olive oil for pan

1. Chop up everything; boil water for pasta; dump in pasta now

2. In large, heavy pan, saute Canadian bacon, 1/2 the diced onion, and the corn kernels until onion starts to go translucent and bacon browns a bit. Remove bacon-corn mixture to a bowl.

3. In the same pan, saute the zucchini and the rest of the onion until zucchini starts to turn brown. Remove to bowl.

4. Deglaze saute pan with your stock; drain pasta. Pour the stock (now with yummy brown bits from the pan) into a saucepan; put over low heat. (I used the same one I used to cook my pasta-- just left the pasta in the colander.) Stir in the parmesan cheese and the bacon-corn mixture; cheese will melt. Stir in cream; toss pasta and zucchini in sauce.

5. Saute the shrimp; this only takes a couple of minutes, so nothing will get cold.

Scallops over orzo with spinach

I didn't cook all weekend due to the unforeseen dangers of a slightly stale loaf of bread and a really sharp bread knife. On the plus side, Sunday was the first known instance of anyone actually cooking anything from the blog. If you've made anything, I'd love to read a comment about it!

This dinner was from a month or two ago-- it was the dinner when I first started taking pictures of appealing things I made.


It turns out that scallops are very easy-- this was a first attempt, and it turned out deliciously. I always love incorporating wine into sauces because then the rest of the bottle compliments dinner nicely.

A note of caution: Do all your prep work here first-- once you have everything on the stove, it goes VERY quickly, and scallops are easy to overcook. There's no time to snip herbs or smash garlic once things are cooking.

Sea scallops over spinach and orzo (serves 2)
6-10 sea scallops (defrosted), more or less depending on size
2-5 cloves garlic, smashed
Bunch of fresh parsley, washed and snipped
White wine (a nice buttery chardonnay would work well here)
Salt
Pepper
1/4 package or so orzo or other little bitty pasta
Olive oil
Spinach (a few cups-- it reduces a lot in the pan)

1. Cook pasta according to package directions.

2. Heat heavy skillet over med-high heat with olive oil until oil is shimmery. Blot scallops dry with paper towel; sprinkle salt, pepper, and parsley on both sides. Add scallops to pan; they cook very quickly. Flip as soon as they no longer stick (2 minutes.) They should cook through in less than 5 minutes; it is very easy to overcook them. When both sides are seared, remove to a plate.

3. Add a little more olive oil, the smashed garlic, and the rest of the parsley. Saute briefly, then add 1/2 c. wine. Bring to boil; reduce slightly, then stir into the drained pasta.

4. Add just a little more olive oil to pan; saute spinach until wilted.

5. Plate the pasta, the spinach, and put the scallops on top.


Enjoy with the rest of the bottle and a pleasant dinner companion.

Corn, bacon, and cream, oh my!

Fry up a couple of slices of bacon in a large, deep frying pan. Remove and slice bacon, sautee a couple of sliced shallots or onions in the grease. Add a couple smashed garlic cloves, cook for a minute or so. Toss in some parboiled asparagus and corn, and then toss in (cooked) chewy pasta and the sliced bacon. Add a couple of tablespoons cream (it doesn't take much) and Parmesan to thicken. Easy! SO GOOD!


This reinforces my belief that either bacon or cream will make anything better; this has both.

Adapted from Bitten; not so much a set recipe as an amazing way to use up odds and ends in the fridge. It's flexible; green beans or asparagus would work, as would most any sort of cured pork.

Gnocchi with vodka sauce

I took these recipes verbatim other sources, so I won't bother re-typing them here. Note: gnocchi takes freaking forever to make-- forcing the potato through the strainer is harder than it seems in the video. It's fun to roll out, though, like playing with play dough. I added Italian sausage and chiffonaded basil for garnish. Everything's better with basil!

Both the gnocchi and vodka sauce freeze beautifully; freeze the uncooked gnocchi on a cookie sheet and then transfer them to a ziploc baggie after they're frozen so you don't end up with one giant clump of potato dough.

Potato gnocchi
Vodka sauce