Tinfoil Chef

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One of the great things about Spaghetti Sauce is that there’s really no carved in stone way to make it. Everybody ends up with their version of sauce that suits their tastes and the ingredients they have available. For at least a year or two now we’ve had one primary way of making the sauce when we want to have spaghetti. Once in a while though, everybody discovers that they’re out of something that they always use in a particular recipe and that’s when they either decide to do something else or make some experimental changes to the old recipe.

That’s pretty much what happened to us this time. We’re also blessed that it turned out as good as it did because I “fowled” something up and there was a few moments when we didn’t know if it was going to work out ok. Thankfully it turned out pretty good, though I’m not going to run out just yet and order a truckload of promotional pens or aprons or anything else just yet. My head’s already big enough as it is. Isn’t it nice that it gets deflated every once in a while by a near-disaster? Ok, it’s not exactly “nice” that near disasters happen but since they do, the least we can do is benefit from them.

In this particular case we had talked about another variation on the sauce recipe that we were going to do sometime soon, and the variation we were going to use this time. I managed to mess things up by including a pound of ground turkey in this batch that was supposed to be saved for the next time. Here’s the recipe that we ended up with.

It’s called “kitchen sink” because you pretty much put everything into it but the kitchen sink. The idea is to use whatever ingredients you have available. We started with some frozen grilled chicken breast patties along with a frozen “Pecan Chicken” (chicken breast with a pecan breading). The original plan was to get them cooked up and then use the food processor to chop it up into small bits and use it as the meat in our sauce. I made the mistake of not only doing that, but including the ground turkey as well.

As the chopped meat heats up in a skillet coated in olive oil I chopped up an onion and added that to the meat along with four heaping teaspoons of minced garlic. At one or two green bell peppers and three or four stalks of celery chopped up into the meat as well if you have them.

When this mixture is heated through it’s time to add a couple 10oz cans of diced tomatoes and two 29oz cans of spaghetti sauce. After you pour the sauce from the cans, use just a bit less than half a can of water to rinse the last bit of sauce out of both cans and add that to the pan. If available, add some Italian seasoning or pizza seasoning.

Stir everything together and let it just start to boil and turn the heat down to low and cover it. Let it simmer like this for two or three hours, stirring every 20 or 30 minutes. If you have it, another great addition to this is spinach. Take about six to nine ounces of spinach, chop it fine and stir it into the sauce. It’ll give the sauce more body and flavor, as well as the extra nutrition of having some “greens” added.

Once it was added to the spaghetti, we had enough for supper tonight and put away enough leftovers for two more meals.

Technorati Tags: foul up, pasta sauce, pecan chicken, grilled chicken, spaghetti sauce, kitchen sink, recipe

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Some of the traffic that comes to Tinfoil Chef is from search engines. What I find interesting is looking at the search terms that they used because it’s interesting to see what kind of search terms are returning results for Tinfoil Chef. Among the more interesting ones recently was two recent visitors came here from google after using ‘cooking with tinfoil in microwave’ as their search terms.

It’s pretty easy to see why google would connect ‘cooking’, ‘tinfoil’, and ‘microwave’ with this site given the name and subject matter of this blog. But it occurred to me that it’d be a good idea to do a post about Cooking With Tinfoil In Microwave Oven.

There’s really only one thing to say about it… “Don’t Do it!“. For one reason, the kind of feedback generated is very bad for the microwave transmitter that is the heart of the oven. Too much operating like that would very likely burn it out completely.

If you’d like any further evidence of why you should never put any kind of metal or foil in a microwave oven, check out the following YouTube Video that somebody did which demonstrates what happens when you do it.

Please note that this demonstration was only with aluminum foil. Had there been food or any flammable material in there it probably would have caught fire, running the risk of not only destroying the oven, but also of spreading to the rest of the house.

Technorati Tags: microwave, fire hazard, burns, aluminum foil, burnout oven, lightning, tinfoil, fire

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