cooking

[aryanhwy]

At home, we make our own spaghetti sauce from scratch, using this recipe. Pasta with red sauce is one of our stock meals, as it's quick, easy, and we almost always have all the ingredients on hand. Sometime we'll spice it up with some capers, dried chili flakes, red bell pepper, and olives, or make meatballs, but usually it's just the basic.

And yet, whenever I'm traveling, it always seems like way too much work, and so I end up buying pasta sauce in a jar from the grocery store (I think the first time I'd ever bought premade sauce was in Copenhagen last November). Twice (three times?) here I've gotten a slightly piquante sauce, which I've enjoyed quite a bit, but decided to go with a change today, so I got the one with olives in it. The other thing I like about pasta (with or without sauce) is that it is such a good way of using up leftovers. I had 1/4 kg ground beef/pork mix, half a package of mushrooms, and we still have more onions than we'll be able to get through in the next week (I leave Wed., Jesse leaves Sat.), so a diced onion, the meat, and the mushrooms went into today's sauce. Yum! And it made enough that I've got two portions of leftovers as opposed to the one I'd expected. That leaves only one dinner left to plan/cook for before I leave. Whoo! (It's hard to get motivated to (a) cook and (b) cook for myself, but since I generally need to be eating around 6:00/6:30, and I never have any idea when Jesse will be coming home, it's up to me to feed myself. I'm doing my best to try to eat well, but I will admit one night I slipped into old college- (and even high school-)student habits, and just bought a can of soup to dump over my pasta. I'll be glad to be home.)

Comments

[ursula]

One way to use up lots of onions is to caramelize them. Here are some things you can add to caramelized onions to make a meal:

* Splash of liquid, handful of walnuts, blue cheese or feta, pasta (or use this as a pizza topping)
* Chopped apple, sausage
* Chopped squash, white beans
* Fried egg, green salad.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I love caramelized onions but I never thought of using them as a base instead of an addition. Mmmmmmm....

[ursula]

One of the things I really liked about doing a farm share is that you had to come up with ways to make *every* vegetable and some fruits the center of a meal. Including apples and onions :)

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

I envy you. Pasta was weekly staple in my family in my pre-marriage days. Jay, however, is convinced that carbs are bad for him and doesn't want to eat a meal that (in his opinion) is basically all carbs. So, I get make pasta very, very rarely. Sometimes I can talk him into it on a Thursday night, since that's our SCA group's fight practice night and he thinks he can work it off.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I didn't really discover the joys of pasta until moving out on my own, as that was when I discovered the joys of such things as pesto and garlic (yeah, I grew up in a mostly garlic-free home, it was a tragedy). I'm very thankful that neither Joel nor I suffers at all from our often carb-heavy diet, because if we didn't have this as an easy fall-back menu, we'd probably end up eating a lot less healthily!