Posts Tagged ‘tomato’

…or as I like to call it “The dinner I throw together exhausted after driving home and unpacking post-Christmas.”

This is one of those gloriously easy, delicious, and hideous dinners you can throw together in 10 minutes and it is just so damn tasty. Just make a quick spicy tomato sauce, crack a few eggs into it, pop the lid on, and poach away. If you’re really ambitious you can toast some nice bread and rub a few garlic cloves on it to ensure extra awesomeness.

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Hey! I’m alive.. just crazy busy with my relocation and whatnot. I’m staying here in Kansas City with my folks for a bit while I transition and of course, that means plenty of gentle nudgings and offhand mentions of how such-and-such dish sounds so good and oh wouldn’t it be nice to have this for dinner. In other words, being home is being my mom’s personal chef, and tonight she suggested quiche so I just happened to make it.

I know this is extremely similar to the goat cheese tart, but I’ve said before how I a) love breakfast for dinner and b) love the ease of dishes like this, especially when you use a prepared pie crust. And, well, I was going nuts not posting anything! So enjoy!

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I love discovering new ingredients to play with. Part of the reason I find cooking so exciting and challenging is that there is an endless ocean of cuisine, recipes, ingredients, and food out there to sail though, and although sometimes the waters are choppy, it’s always a fun adventure.

I tried bison meat for the first time recently via it being on sale at my local grocer, and I was amazed by the taste. It really wasn’t gamey as I had expected it to be, but had a very rich, meaty flavor with a great natural earthiness to it. And then I found out it has half the calories and 1/8 the fat as normal beef, plus it’s always free-range. I was in love.

So pondering what to do with a pound of ground bison… meatballs naturally popped into my head. Spaghetti and meatballs is one of those comfort foods universally loved, like pizza or mac n cheese. So why not take on a classic. The meatballs are unbelievably tender and moist despite using such a naturally lean protein (something I was worried about), and the flavor is classically garlicky with parmesan.  My recipe for simple tomato sauce is one of those great things that you can make with pantry staples and it barely takes any time or attention. Plus it always tastes better than the jarred stuff – I guarandamntee it.

Panko.

Meatballs!

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I don’t know about you but after that last post I needed a break from complicated cooking. And since the temperature keeps dropping, my soup Achilles heel weakened me once again and I felt the need to make something that required a lot of simmering and an over-sized Dutch oven.

Now as much as I love Kraft singles between sliced Wonder bread with a bowl of Campbell’s watery tomato soup, sometimes I’m craving something a little more… substantial. I love a good chunky tomato soup so it’s filling and feels like a meal, not just an appetizer or snack, and this recipe fits that bill quite nicely. The texture is thick and hearty, perfect for dipping say, French bread toasted with some Parmesan cheese sprinkled over it. Or maybe a grilled cheese with rye bread and pepperjack sandwiched between it. No matter what you pair with it, this soup is rich, satisfying, and the perfect thing to warm you up on a cold, lazy day.

And a fun note to end with! I recently won Endless Simmer’s contest for Smallest Kitchen (hooray! sort of?) and they gave me a nice little shout-out so I wanted to return the favor. Thanks, guys!

Happy Autumn, everyone! Well, maybe not happy, since this is the weather that greeted me yesterday:

Talk about inspiration for something warming.

You know that scene in “Ratatouille” when Anton Ego is stopped dead in his tracks when he smells and tastes Remy’s ratatouille because it so acutely reminds him of his mother and his childhood? That’s what this dish is to me. Not only does this chili remind me of autumn and thus it was my first dish I happily made for the season, but it so embodies my vision of my mother in the kitchen.  Almost every Sunday in the fall she would make a huge batch of soup or stew, whether it be chili, potato soup, beef tomato rice, chicken noodle, etc, and always make it an all-day affair. Even when I would come home once in awhile from Cornell my mom would still make a batch at an ungodly hour on Sunday morning so I’d have a few Tupperware containers to take back with me.

The chili was always the best though. I remember asking my mother for the recipe time and time again to which she would always reply “There’s no real recipe – it’s a method, and every batch is different, you know that.”

So here is my version of my mother’s method, which she learned from her own mother.  It’s such a simple dish, with very few (and cheap) ingredients. It’s all about time and layering flavors (like any good soup or stew) so this isn’t something you can whip together on the fly and eat 20 minutes later (in my dreams).  I use almost all the same ingredients my mom and grandma do and did, except I change the cooking method a bit to keep the texture of the veggies a bit sharper and I up the spice level quite a bit.  The celery adds such a nice freshness to the chili and alongside the sweet tomatoes, nothing feels or smells more like autumn to me than this dish.

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