Tinfoil Chef

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The casserole is one of those great dishes that let you create most of a meal at once. What’s special about this one is that it’s not everyday you find one made with spaghetti.

While this is getting ready, preheat the oven to 350 and start water boiling for pasta When the water’s boiling get a package of spaghetti cooking. Drain it when it’s done and have it ready.

Brown a pound of hamburger (ground turkey works great too!), breaking it up along the way so that it’s crumbly.

Chop a couple of medium onions, two stalks of celery and a green bell pepper and add that to the meat. Cook this for about three minutes or so until the onions start to soften a bit and turn clear.

Add a cup of diced tomatoes and simmer another few minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.

In a buttered two quart casserole combine the pasta and sauce. At this point the original recipe calls for a couple teaspoons of blue cheese to go in there as well. However since I would rather eat a Linksys router than use blue cheese, I humbly suggest parmesan cheese instead.

Finally sprinkle some more parmesan cheese on top. Then it’s into the oven for twenty minutes.

Technorati Tags: spaghetti casserole, spaghetti, casserole, ground turkey, recipe

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

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I made a dish the other day following a recipe found online and had another one of those times where I got to learn something the hard way.

This dish combined, among other things, pasta and potatoes. My wife and I had high hopes for this because it smelled so good in the slow cooker. What I *should* have done was adjust the recipe and stop short of adding any pasta to it.

What I ended up doing was discovered that there was no macaroni around and substituted Penne instead. The pasta was added about a half hour or so before the end of the cooking time. By the time it was done, those seemingly small Penne tubes had swelled to a proportion that I honestly don’t remember seeing before. It looked large enough to be used as a sheath over a CAT5e network cable.

To make a long story short, it turned out to be a tasteless disaster. Between the pasta and the potatoes, the thing was really starchy and loaded to the gills with carbs. The noodles began to disintegrate and several other ingredients were literally lost, almost impossible to find.

The moral of the story is that if a recipe has potatoes in it, you want to be very careful about whether or not to add any kind of pasta to it.

Technorati Tags: potatoes, disaster, starches, pasta, slow cooker, carbs

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I’ve had a problem lately with tomato sauces, specifically the sauce didn’t want to sauce stick to the pasta, resulting in the pasta basically laying there in an almost “sauce soup” kinda thing. It would simply come right off of the pasta as you picked it up.

So I spent a bunch of time looking around the net trying to find ways to get it to cooperate. Here’s the results of what I found out.

The first tip was to use tomato paste to thicken the sauce.

A common tip was to use a bit of corn starch. Mix it with a little water and then stir it into the sauce.

Another common tip was to cook the sauce “gently” on a low heat for a long long time. The moisture evaporates as it cooks and the sauce is reduced to a concentrated and thicker form.

One that I liked was to add some chopped up dehydrated tomatoes to soak up moisture as the sauce cooks.

For cheese lovers, a little grated Parmesan and a little flour (preferably semolena if you have it) will thicken the sauce.

When cooking the noodles, make sure not to overcook them. They should be “al dente”, firm to the tooth.

Finally, another popular bit of advice was to never rinse the noodles after boiling and draining them because doing so washes away the starch that normally helps the sauce to stick to the noodles. Instead, when the noodles are done, drain them and allow them to sit draining in the colander for several minutes to make sure all of the water is drained away.

Technorati Tags: pasta, pasta tips, cooking tips, stick to pasta, sauce tips, sauce

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Ok, after the last entry about Sardine Rolls, It’s time to get that taste out of memory and what better way to do it than with a good Lasagna.

You’ll need a couple of 29 or 30 oz. jars/cans of your favorite spaghetti sauce (or an equivalent amount of a home made sauce)

Start by thawing a 10 oz package of frozen spinach spinach and squeezing it dry.

In a large container mix 2 cups part skim ricotta cheese, 1 1/2 cups of shredded part skim mozzarella cheese, a beaten egg, 1/8 teaspoon of black pepper, 1/2 teaspoon of oregano and 1/2 teaspoon of basil. Add the thawed spinach and blend well.

Use a 13 x 9 inch pan. Put a small amount of sauce in the bottom of the pan and spread lightly so that it covers the bottom. This keeps the lasagna from sticking as it cooks so that you can easily remove it in neat portions at serving time.

Place a third of the uncooked noodles, a third of the sauce and a third of the cheese and spinach mixture. Repeat to Make 3 layers, Topping it off with the sauce.

Combine a half cup of water and a half cup of vegetable juice cocktail (V8 or similar) or tomato juice. Pour this carefully around the edges of the casserole, moving the noodles slightly with a spatula to get the liquid distributed evenly. This is the time to get out the grated parmesan cheese and sprinkle it on top. I would also be tempted to put the parmesan cheese between the layers as well.

Cover the pan tightly with foil and bake at 350 degrees for 1 to 1 and 1/4 hours. Remove the foil and continue baking for a few minutes more, until the top is lightly browned and bubbling.

Let the lasagna stand for at least 15 minutes before serving so that it can cool a bit to serving temperature and “set”. Sliced with a flat edged spatula and lift out serving-sized portions.

Technorati Tags: main dish, recipe, lasagna, dinner, casserole, pasta, italian food

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