After looking over the amazing potato-flake pickerel recipe, I want one again, but sadly, I don’t have the ingredients and I’ve had a few too many Caesars to drive, so I’m stuck with what I have in the house. And since I’m in a fishy mood, that will be another beer-battered haddock or two with fries, tartar sauce, and malt vinegar.
It’s been chilly here for the past few weeks (by California standards, anyway), so I wanted a hearty pasta dish. So I decided to try a new recipe: Rigatoni with Pork Ragù and Fresh Ricotta.
That looks delicious, and the key for me is the ricotta. It’s an absolutely amazing Italian cheese with a double taste profile – an initial taste, and a lingering smooth aftertaste. Aside from tasting it in its pure form, I’ve only had it with lasagna. I’m sure I’d love this rigatoni dish. My most frequent pasta dish is delicate spaghettini, but the thick pasta chunks of rigatoni seems like it would be great experience too! Damn, I just love all Italian food!
Yeah, that looks great!
I did a lasagna for the first time last night… we’ll be eating it for the rest of the week.
Cooking something for the first time, I will usually spend a little time reading multiple recipes and online discussions in order to understand ingredient ratios, temp/time options, styles/approaches, and just feel more grounded. For this I used my grandfather’s written recipe, Joy of Cooking, a few random online recipe blogs, and reddit. I learned there are two main questions when it comes to lasagna: no-boil pasta vs. regular, and ricotta vs. bechamel (vs. cottage cheese, which is a US variant).
I went with regular pasta (which was much less difficult than no-boil marketing would have one think) because the pasta is an important part of the dish and I wanted the thicker, chewier pasta sheets.
My grandfather’s recipe used ricotta. Joy of Cooking used bechamel. Folks online talked about the browning of the bechamel as being one of its selling points. So… I did both! Filled with ricotta, and topped with a bechamel.
I also made a ragu mostly following Joy of Cooking’s recipe. I was home and doing chores around the house, so getting started a little early to let a sauce render wasn’t too much trouble.
So, this lasagna had the following layers:
- 3x pasta
- 3x Beef-only ragu (ground beef, carrot, onion, celery, wine, tomato paste, milk, fennel, dried basil, pepper flakes, salt, and volumed up a bit with some jarred sauce).
- 2x Ricotta (ricotta, egg, parsley, and a negligible amount of grated parmesan cheese)
- 1x Grated cheese (mozzarella, provolone)
- 1x bechamel (butter, flour, milk, nutmeg, salt, simmered with an onion, carrot, and celery and then strained).
Definitely not a heart-healthy version of lasagna, but it came out heavenly. The herbs in the ragu and nutmeg in the bechamel really played well together. Nice thick toothsome pasta (De Cecco brand), with thin layers of sauces in between, including one melty cheese layer.
Tonight, a prepared General Tao (aka “General Tso”) chicken rice bowl, with fried rice. As a noodle fanatic I like it even better when they make it with thin rice noodles instead of rice, but they don’t do it often and rice is more traditional. Followed by some clementine oranges and an ice cream sandwich which I just noticed is, tragically, the last one in the box!
@Eonwe, that sounds marvellous! I haven’t made homemade lasagna for many years. It’s a lot of trouble but when done well it’s really amazing stuff. You’ve inspired me to do it again sometime.
I’ve never made it with bechamel but there’s a variant of store-made lasagna that’s made with bechamel that I buy occasionally and quite like it.
Pad Thai with tofu, and a Sweet Alice apple, my new favorite. I’ve only seen them at Trader Joe’s.
Dinner tonight will once again be chorizo sausages oven-baked in a baking dish coated with pizza sauce with a bed of chopped white onion and green pepper, once again with baked mac & cheese. I was on the fence about making this again because I’ve made it so often, but looking at the best-by date on the sausages, they had just been freshly made, so I couldn’t resist.
The difference this time is that there are sausage buns for the leftover sausages for the next few days, which ought to make great gourmet “hot dogs” with the fried onion and tomato sauce mixture wedged in and either Dijon or yellow mustard on top. To be had either with fries or tomato soup. Or if the weather is nice and I make it out to the nice supermarket that has a very fine soup stand, maybe a nice fresh soup like clam chowder or Forest Mushroom.
Homemade jalapeno pintos with brisket as the flavoring meat, and jalapeno cornbread. Beans are cooking right now and filling the house with their scent. Mmmmmmm.
This turned out to be so good that most of the sausages have already been consumed this way (with Dijon, not yellow mustard) and the baked mac & cheese remains unbaked. About 1000x better than an ordinary hot dog!
The only trick to remember is to remove the casing from the sausage. It’s fine if you’re eating it on a plate with a knife and fork, but stringy when you’re munching on it in a bun. Removing the skin does remove some of the flavour, but the onions, tomato sauce, and green pepper that have simmered in the juices bring plenty of flavour of their own. It’s the perfect condiment for the sausage bun! I should have done this long ago!
I’ll probably end up having the mac & cheese with the breakfast sausages that I made earlier and froze. Which is fine – when I have m&c, I just need a little accent of some kind of meat, or I can just have good baked m&c all by itself.
Last night I had a rehearsal in the evening and didn’t really have time to go home before hand (in the opposite direction), and so was going to have some kind of grocery store/convenience store food for dinner. But, I realized there was a basic Chinese food place near my destination and so got myself some Chinese take-out.
I have two truly “guilty” food pleasures (as in, I love them, they are awful for me, and if left to my own devices I would probably kill myself by eating them way too often): 1) hot dogs, and 2) decent pork fried rice and General Tso’s chicken or related variations.
I had a sesame chicken “combo” last night that was excellent! The rice was good, dry and not mushy, had that flavor I cannot get at home (wok hei?) that is such a treat. The chicken was all small pieces, which I prefer- many places have larger balls that have a lot of breading/filling that is quite unappetizing. This chicken had enough batter but no more, and the sauce had a nice heat to balance the sweetness.
The only miss were the boneless “ribs”… large pieces of mostly fat. I did not finish them, as they were pretty unappetizing.
I had a couple of ham, brie, and fig jam sliders, and an apple.
I’m pre-prepping a bunch of easy-to-cook meals and leftover options for the next couple of days. I have a batch of soy-ginger marinated chicken thighs to cook on need, but tonight I’m making a bunch of luscious chicken fajitas.
I have a couple of strips of green chile bacon left over from making posole over the weekend, rendered in the pan, in which I cooked about half an onion, three chopped jalapenos, and one red pepper. I used the remaining seasoned grease in the skillet to cook about 1.5 pounds of chicken thighs, further seasoned with Penzy’s fajita mix and green chile. Served with hot flour tortillas, and all the leftovers to carry me through the holiday.
There is very little savory food that doesn’t benefit from being cooked in fresh cooked bacon drippings!
[ generations of ancestors may look upon my secular Jewish self with shame ]
I’m doing something similar, except, in my usual style, the pre-prepped meals are store-prepped. There’s enough stuff that I probably won’t go out to complete my grocery shopping as I had intended until after Christmas.
Goodies to have over the next few days include a prepared turkey dinner (thick slices of turkey breast, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, a container of turkey gravy, and another of cranberry sauce), chicken Caesar wraps, grilled chicken souvlaki skewers with rice and tzatziki sauce, sweet & sour chicken with fried rice, ravioli and mushrooms, and steak & mushroom pie. All freshly made, although I put the last three in the freezer so they’ll keep. When I get a lot of stuff like this it’s always a challenge to decide what to freeze and what to leave in the fridge.
Merry Christmas, everyone! So far the above-mentioned goodies have all turned out excellent, as I would expect from that particular store. The festive turkey dinner was had last night, and it was delicious. I had the ravioli for lunch, and it was even better than expected – it was from the hot buffet and was simply marked as “pasta”, but it was stuffed with ricotta and I threw in some sauteed mushrooms.
Tonight will be the chicken souvlaki, with herring and sour cream as an appetizer. Tomorrow, sweet & sour chicken with fried rice. The prepared dinners are quite substantial and I fear that the holiday season will result in some weight gain!
Sometime before the new year I have to make it down to that store again and pick up one or two more turkey dinners. They’re really fantastic and they only have them during the holiday season.
I’m feeling in the mood for a real ‘Goodfellas’ style Sunday gravy- I saved the bones from the Christmas rib roast I’m going to cook in the sauce for flavor, and I’m adding both meatballs and segments of Italian sausage to it, like the Italian side of my wife’s family does. Also, got a nice French baguette I’m going to make into garlic toast.
My son is home from college for the holidays. He complains that the food at college is terrible. So I’ve been making him some good food while he’s here.
Yesterday I work on the sauce for hours-- searing the rib bones, cooking the Italian sausage, making the meatballs, simmering, tasting and adjusting the flavors, pulling meat from the long-simmered ribs. I end up with a rich, meaty sauce about 4 hours later.
Toward the end I mash some minced garlic into soft butter, spread it on pieces of baguette, and toast them up in the toaster oven. That whole process takes about 15 minutes.
My son’s reaction to the meal? “Wow, this is great garlic toast!” 
Szechan chicken and rice.
Hah! But, just goes to show that “good” food does not have to take time or be complex. Real bread with butter or cheese (add garlic or herb of choice) is a pinnacle of gustatory satisfaction.
I’ll take the sauce too, though! We had pasta a few nights ago, and I had a hot sausage that I chopped, browned, and then simmered with a random jar of sauce from the cabinet… I forgot how some added meat (and its rendered fat) can transform a sauce.
I’ve made sauce with a mix of meatballs and Italian sausage before, but adding the meaty ribs left over from the Christmas standing rib roast, and simmering them in the sauce for hours, really made it next-level. In the future I’m going to save and freeze leftover pork and beef bones from other meals to simmer in future Sunday sauces.
According to an Italian friend who made fantastic pasta sauce, simmering the tomato sauce for a long time with rib bones was a key part of the process. Not everyone believes this is essential, but damn, he made great sauce!
As for me tonight, this tempts me to make spaghettini, but the problem is that I’m overdue for a big grocery shop tomorrow and when I make spaghetti there’s gonna be massive leftovers cluttering up the fridge.
So tonight I think just a frozen wood-oven pizza (slightly smoky, with pepperoni, mushroom, and green pepper) to which I will add chopped white onion and fresh green pepper, with a bit of extra garlic pizza sauce around the edges.