Just some pasta and tomato sauce....

Hey folks. I (Emily) was not about to get left out in the influx of new posts, so here we go. This was an endeavor Iain and I undertook back in August and just never got around to posting what with house hunting, new jobs, Fulbright Applications, etc. For the record, do not do this unless you have a lot of time open, like a Saturday or something. It's totally worth it though.

So, as you may remember, last summer I was the proud keeper of a backyard garden with a huge crop of basil. The result of this was a need, towards the end of the summer, to use up said basil. We made a ton of pesto and froze some leaves with oil in a jar, but even that didn't finish it off. Thus, we were left with the fortunate responsibility of using up the rest. In one of these endeavors, we decided to attempt homemade basil pasta.

Now, don't panic here. You've probably heard about hours and hours spent rolling paper thin sheets, cutting them up, and finding places for them to dry. And yeah, that's pretty legit, but ultimately it's less work than I thought it'd be, and it's also fun work.

Iain and I consulted a few sources when figuring out our recipe, but we ended up with a hodgepodge that I feel no guilt about posting up here. So, here's what ya need.

Ingredients

• several handfuls of fresh basil, chopped into small pieces
  
• one cup of flour per egg, more or less. I think we used four and four, and that made a ton of pasta.
• a pinch or two of salt

Pretty simple ingredients all in all, yes? If you don't have basil, you can use another herb or make it without, but the basil was pretty awesome. It's a summer thing though, I know, and pasta's good all year round. You could try it with spinach too, or even squash or something I bet. Anyway, off we go.

Procedure

• Pour the flour out onto the counter. You need a big counter space for this, both for mixing and rolling. If you don't have one, you might want to consider using a table instead.


• Push all the flour into a big mound and make a little well in the center by scooping some of the flour out and mounting it on the sides.

• Crack the eggs into the well. Well, don't crack them into the well. Crack them on the counter and open them into the well. Be careful so as not to breach the walls. It should look something like this:



• Carefully beat the eggs a bit with a fork, then start to incorporate some of the flour around them. Continue doing this, slowly in order to avoid breaking the walls, until the flour and eggs become a cohesive mass. You can add the basil when it feels manageable, like it won't make mixing impossible or just get all over the floor. For me, I think that was about halfway through. If you really feel like making green pasta, you can mix the flour and basil in the food processor, but I like the little green flecks better than I think I would a green noodle. However, if you're using squash or something, you'll definitely want to the use the food processor method. If you need to, add a bit of water or flour to get to the right texture. It shouldn't be so sticky that it's sticking to your hands, but you'll add flour during the rolling process, so it shouldn't feel dry either. Something like this.
  


• Now, this is the fun part if you're like Iain and enjoy rolling things out. For me, this is the not-so-fun part. But it's still worth it. Split the dough into manageable chunks (I think we did four, but it depends on the size of your rolling pin and counter space) and start rolling. This will take awhile. You need to get it pretty darn thin-- something in the realm of 1/8 inch. It depends on what pasta shape you're making. Of course, if you have a pasta machine, that takes care of it, but being poor and mobile, we do not. Go generous with the flour, both on the rolling surface and the rolling pin. Sticky pasta is sad pasta. It should look like this when it's done.
  


• This next bit is the fun part for me, because you get to shape it. We decided to do about half linguine/fettuccini (depending on how thick our strips were) and half farfalle. There are a few ways to make strip-style pastas. One is to take each bit of rolled out dough and just slice it into strips. Some will be longer than others, but don't worry about it. If memory serves me correctly, this was Iain's preferred method. I liked the jelly roll method myself. Basically, take a piece of rolled out dough and roll it tightly lengthwise or widthwise, depending on how long you want your pasta. Then cut off strips about 1/8-1/4 inch thick and unroll them into pasta. It won't look perfect, but it works.
  For the farfalle, cut pasta into little rectangles about 1 in x 2 in and pinch the middle of each together with thumb and forefinger to form the bow ties. You won't be able to use all of each pasta sheet for this shape, since you need the rectangles for it to work, so make the edges into short linguine or something.
  
• Now it's drying time. For the farfalle, baskets work really well, but we didn't have any, so we just left them on plates in single layers. For the linguine, coat hangers worked surprisingly well,although we had to be careful when centering the noodles on so they wouldn't fall right off. We let the noodles dry for perhaps three or four hours, and that seemed sufficient. The farfalle kept in an airtight container for a few days beyond that. It might have been good for longer, but we didn't want to take the risk, so we ate it.

That evening, it was show time. We put up a pot of water to boil and got started on a simple sauce. The chances of us ever buying tomato sauce again are nil to none, because canned tomatoes work so well. We threw a can of diced ones into a saucepan with some diced up onion, garlic, dried oregano, more fresh basil, olive oil, and crushed red pepper, let it simmer up for a bit, and voila-- cheap and awesome sauce.

Fresh pasta only takes about five minutes to boil, or at least ours did. The coat hanger linguine took a bit of maneuvering to get into the water, since it was bent in half, but we got it without much, if any, breakage. However, if you plan to gift the fresh pasta before it's cooked, you might want to dry it on something that will allow it to stay straight. I've heard towels work well.

And there you have it. Fresh, homemade pasta and tomato sauce. The stuff is filling too. It's so eggy! So make it when you get the chance, and happy Halloween to all!! (I'm gonna be a Jedi).

Weeee'rrreeee BACK!

Hello folks! After a deplorably long hiatus, Yummies! is back. During said hiatus, I (Iain) was busy finding us a house to live in, then we all moved into said house, Emily and I both started our Americorps positions, and then we generally just started getting used to life as normal again. Then, when we were ready to start posting, Emily's camera died (temporarily), with all the sumptious pictures of food trapped inside it.

So, new things you should know about before I show you pictures of food!

1. Our friend and housemate Ian Boswell returned from Europe to resume cooking with us and begin posting on the blog (see his post for the quite excellent Midtown Marinara. Note - this is not your great uncle's marinara!).

2. We moved across the Mississippi to Minneapolis - specifically a neighborhood called Seward, which is full of excellent opportunities to buy awesome local food, which we now cook with as much as possible! The Seward Co-Op and the Midtown Farmers' Market are both great for this.

3. We are poor. As said before, Emily and I are both doing Americorps and Ian is a musician. That means everything we make, you can afford too!

So, to bring in the new Yummies! season, here's a quick tour of some of the dishes we've made since our last pre-Ian Boswell post that we weren't going to do a full post on:

Tortilla Soup

This tasty recipe came out of Emily's Rebar Cookbook, from the acclaimed and reputedly awesome Rebar restaurant in Victoria (hence why we can't put the recipe on here. Sorry, we don't steal other people's recipes - we were good students who don't plagiarize!).
The soup was full of cilantro, avocado, and I think a fair amount of corn, and then we made little teepees out of the toasted tortilla strips and garnished with lime juice. We highly reccomend this cookbook to veggie lovers!



Peanut Butter Chocolate Cake

Emily made this glorious treat on one of her famous "baking adventures." She doesn't remember what she did to make them (hence, no recipe on this one either, sorry!) but don't they just make you want to reach through the screen and nom on it right now? Yeah, I thought so. Basic formula was:
1. Make chocolate cake with some peanut butter in it.
2. Make a gooey peanut butter sauce to put on top.
3. Make a gooey fudgy sauce to go on top of the previous sauce.
Tada!


Fragrant Green Curry with Vegetables

This Thai curry recipe came from my Jamie Oliver cookbook: the Naked Chef, which is rapidly becoming a favorite cooking aide. This photo, which really doesn't do it justice, shows the final product in a bowl on top of rice and garnished with cilantro and pistachios. We basically loaded all the ingredients for the curry paste (including plenty of fresh basil and cilantro from our garden) into Emily's new cuisinart and blended them, and then made curry like normal. It made for an absolutely fabulous curry, which made me appreciate green curry more than ever before.


Emily's Carrot Cake of Awesomeness

This one's going into the general no recipes post just because we're so backlogged with posts yet-to-be-written-even-though-we-have-the-pictures. Maybe she will give the recipe some day, but that might not happen. She never stops with the baking adventures. She will have more. But suffice to say she made some really nice carrot cake from scratch, complete with her cream cheese icing. The final product made her happy and squeaky, as can be seen in the picture.




Tostadas from Scratch

This one was super easy, but super yummy and really fun to make. Also, it is photogenic, no? This recipe came from one of Emily's Mollie Katzen cookbooks (either the Moosewood Cookbook, or the Enchanted Broccoli Forest - both awesome) and was made on some summer night when we just wanted something quick and easy. Apparently for us, "quick and easy" involves frying your own corn tortillas and making your own hot sauce from scratch. :-p
Actually, on that topic, MAKE YOUR OWN HOT SAUCE! It's pretty easy, and it's waayy delicious! All you need is some minced up tomatoes, some minced up garlic, some minced up onion, some spiciness agent and a little water to get it to the right consistency. It took like 5 minutes and blew anything away anything you can get out of a bottle.

Bozzie's Southern Noms:
Sauteed Button Mushrooms with Brandy
and Baked Stuffed Squash

This was one of the first dishes Ian Boswell (often referred to as "Bozzie") made after our first visit to the Seward Co-op. It came from the Fearrington House Cookbook and featured a lovely peasant meal of button mushrooms sauteed in brandy and bread crumbs and a sort of casserole of squash and some sort of cheese. The whole affair was sprinkled heavily with shredded pamesan cheese and accompanied by some good rustic bread and some good rustic water. Okay, the water was distinctly urban, but it was a good rustic meal nonetheless.

aaaaand...

Iain's Improvised Swedish Pancakes

After a trip to Ikea, I marched back home the proud owner of a jar of lingonberries. Now, I love Swedish pancakes, and I am a crepe-making fiend (video post of that to come eventually!), so I decided to adapt my crepe-making to be sweeter and on a bigger pan. Its main flaw was just that I absentmindedly put in as many eggs as I would put in for crepes, and hence the pancakes had a crepe's level of egginess, instead of a proper Swedish pancake's level, but oh well. It still made for a yummy breakfast and a pretty photo shoot, presented folded in half and decorated with lingonberries and powdered sugar.


Well, hopefully we've tantalized your taste-buds a little for the coming posts! We hope to see you soon!

-Iain

Midtown Market Marinara Sauce

Hello foodies of the world! My name is Ian and I am your resident omnivore. Like my friends with whom I share this blog, I just graduated from Macalester College last spring, myself with a music major and history minor. I am taking a year off to pursue my musical and creative interests before forging ahead into the world of lifelong academica! My goal right now is to get a Ph.D in composition and become a college professor. We'll see how that turns out!

I've lived with Iain and Emily for over a year now and we happily still share a kitchen. This past September, I drove back up from PA (my home state) after a summer spent abroad in France and Switzerland! I was in Paris for the month of July, studying music at the Ecole Normale, and afterwards spent three weeks traveling by myself. It was a fantastic adventure. I learned a lot about myself and the world around me, and returned with a new zest for life!

Anyhow, back in September I came up and the three of us moved from our apartment in St. Paul to a little bungalow in Minneapolis, and we love it! It feels like a "real people" house, not a student house. It's quite cozy, being very heat efficient, and has nice wood floors through most of it. And there's a perfect little nook in our living room for my piano. Joy!! I also brought up my cello, which I have recently started to play again, having taken a break my senior year in high school. Our little home is a haven of creative writing circles, book reading, great music, and, of course, excellent food!

You can expect my adventures to wander into non-vegetarian realms from time to time, but I generally cook things that don't explicitly require meat or meat products. My goal in cooking is to get the most out of great local and/or sustainably grown ingredients. To Emily's great chagrin, and the revulsion of a few un-stout souls (Emily has just thwacked me for that one), I saved the drippings from some excellent local, grass-fed pepper bacon from our beloved Seward Co-op, and began to experiment with using it as a cooking ingredient, rather than simply chucking it. The bacon was so great, it seemed like a great waste to throw any part of it away.

Lo and behold! Lard, despite all its connotations, contains more of the "good" kinds of fat than butter, and is great when used in moderation. If you're curious, google "lard health" - go ahead and laugh at the oxymoron, but you might be surprised with what you find! Humans have been cooking with it for centuries, so it can't be *that* bad.

This, however, is not an entry about lard. I am here to tell you about the dish I made way back in September, when it was nice and warm and the sun sparkled through green leaves in our lovely little backyard. I went to the Midtown Market and picked up a bunch of awesome-looking heirloom tomatoes, as well as patty pan squash, bell peppers, and red thai peppers:


Yum!! I decided to make a marinara sauce so that I could best experience the flavors of all these different kinds of tomatoes. I'm actually not too familiar with heirloom vegetables, and I'm still getting the hang of the various flavors and functions of all kinds of food, so I took some notes on each tomato as I cut it up:

Small red zebra striped tomato: spicy, vibrant flavor
Sm/med red: sweet, delicate
Plum: meaty and rich
Dark green/purple: dark, subtle
Yellow: light and flavorful
Orange: zesty
Multicolored with a red base: full bodied, rich flavor - mmm!

I think I liked the multicolored ones the best, but I figure that a variety of different tomatoes would make for the best sauce. I based it on a marinara recipe out of my friend Drew's Italian cookbook, and, unfortunately, it is copied down in my personal cookbook without a reference, so I can't give you the name of it. Shame!


Midtown Market Marinara Sauce
Ingredients:
10 heirloom tomatoes of various sizes
olive oil - and I used about a tablespoon of delicious, ethically and sustainably farmed lard in addition to the olive oil ;)
many garlic cloves - i used 4 or 6
an onion
1 little red thai pepper, SEEDED. I made the mistake of cooking with the seeds once. It wasn't pretty.
8-10 basil leaves, we had a lot left over from Emily's basil plant at the old house!
salt and pepper
a bell pepper
three patty pan squash
local Parmesan
a little sugar (for if it gets too acidic - I didn't use it)

Kitchen Equipment
Knife
Cutting board
Wok
Wooden spoon!
Big ol' pasta pot
Colander
Skillet

Music Listened To:
Norah Jones, Oscar Peterson

1. Chop things. Everything but the patty pan squash gets diced nice and small, so it cooks into a good sauce that's not too chunky, but still chunky enough to have that awesome hand-made quality to it. Slice up the patty pans and cut them so they are appealing to you as something to put on top of the pasta. Note that though I bought two bell peppers, I've only used about half of them, saving the other half for another purpose.


2. Garlic to the skillet. Heat up some olive oil mixed with either lard or butter - on medium heat, so it won't scorch. When the surface is rippling lightly, add the onion, garlic, and thai pepper, and stir this till just golden, about 2 minutes.

3. Everything in. Add tomatoes, basil, most of the bell peppers, and a dash each of salt and pepper. Cook uncovered on medium heat for anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour and a half, stirring occasionally so the sauce doesn't scorch or burn. You might need to turn the heat down and, if so, give it more time to cook. Keep tasting it and when the flavors are coming out nicely and it has a consistency you like, add a little more olive oil to it, taste it, and season it. If it's too acidic, add sugar one teaspoon at a time. When the juice evaporates and the sauce is thick, it is done!



4. Make some pasta. A box should do. I mean, maybe you bought some more tomatoes than I did, but my proportions are what they are, as a humble bachelor making dinner for himself.

5. Saute the patty pans. Heat up some olive oil mixed with butter or lard in a skillet, and throw in the patty pans with the rest of the bell peppers. If you want, you could also save some of the garlic and put that in first, but if you're already at this point in the recipe, you probably should have thought of this about an hour ago. Stir it around, add a little pepper, maybe white pepper, if you have it, would be neat to add here. I just used black 'cause that's all we have. When they've softened to the point that they are tender but still have a slight crunch, take them off the heat.


6. Prepare and serve! Get some pasta into a bowl, ladle some marinara on top of it, put some squash on top of the marinara and some parmesan on top of the squash. And there you go! Brilliant! Some of you might question my use of squash on pasta, but trust me, they work great. Because I didn't have any wine yet, my beverage of choice was a glass of delicious local milk. I hope this turns out as zesty and wonderful as it did for me! Though, do go easy on the lard, because it gets a bit heavy if you're not careful!! And watch out for peeved vegetarian housemates, too, while you're at it ;)