Roasted tomato sauce

I like to kick off the tomato-sauce-making season with roasted sauce. It's perfect when you have a fair amount of tomatoes, but now enough to justify going through all the effort of canning. I found this recipe years ago in Everyday Food (you're the best, Martha), and have made it countless times since.

I start by coating my pans with plenty of olive oil, thyme, salt & pepper, then layer sliced onions, and halved & cored tomatoes. Add a little more oil on top, and toss them in the oven.

After about an hour or so they look like this.

I let them cool on the counter for a bit, and then pinch off the tomato skins.

Then I toss everything in a pot, and break out the emulsion blender. (This is the best thing ever -- and so cheap!)

Sometimes I puree just a little bit, and sometimes I make it smooth. I let it cook down for a little while, then let it cool and get it ready for the freezer. Damn, it's good!

Basil = pesto

This year I found some fancy basil seeds imported from Italy at the hardware store and decided to try growing basil from seed. Ricardo absolutely loves pesto, so I planted a whole bunch of it, and now we're on our second major basil harvest of the season.

Here's our out-of-control basil, ready for harvest.

Johnny agrees that this stuff sure smells good.

Ricardo is in charge of washing the basil and making sure there are no spiders hiding in there. (In my defense he knew I was a bug-a-phobic when he married me.)

After we pulled all the leaves off the stems, I laid them out to dry.

Meanwhile, I slowly toast the pine nuts until they're a nice golden brown.

Making pesto is actually quite easy if you have a food processor. All you need is basil, pine nuts, garlic and olive oil (and salt & pepper, of course).

I make it in batches, filling the bowl with the basil, a handful of nuts, 2 or 3 cloves of garlic, salt and pepper.

As the machine is running, I pour in olive oil until it looks something like this.

After I've got all the batches made, I combine it all into the bowl again, adding more oil and processing the pesto until it's the consistency I like. 

Voila! I put about a quarter cup of pesto in each of these little bowls, and now they're ready for the freezer. 

Cooking the "KAF Guaranteed" recipes: dinner rolls

Ever since I got my KitchenAid stand mixer, I've been trying to find easy & successful recipes for yeast breads. Well, I think I might have stumbled upon a damn good source: the King Arthur Flour Guaranteed Recipes. To quote their website, these recipes don't call for any hard-to-find ingredients, and they've been tested over and over again -- so they're practically guaranteed to come out tasty.

Today, we're baking soft white dinner rolls. The ingredients are pretty simple -- the only 2 things that didn't have in my pantry were dry milk and instant mashed potatoes. But, they were cheap and I didn't mind spending a little money to see how this came out.
You start like you do with any yeast bread, with the yeast. You need to add the yeast to warm water and wait 15 minutes for it to activate. Do yourself a favor, and set the timer. Otherwise, you're sure to rush it. Another hint, if you're making this in a KitchenAid mixer, warm the metal bowl with hot water before you start.

While the yeast is doing its thing, get your dry ingredients measured and ready to go. My favorite method for measuring is with a scale. I bought one of these after my last cooking class, and I really love it. Before, measuring flour was a headache: is the flour too dense, too loose, is it really a proper measurement? No need to worry with a scale: 12 3/4 oz. is 12 3/4 oz. And, the King Arthur Flour recipes have a radio button, where you can choose whether you would like your recipe given in cups or ounces -- brilliant!

Then, add you ingredients all together in the mixing bowl, make sure everything is incorporated well, and then let the dough hook work its magic. (Again, set the timer and walk away -- way less stress that way.)

Then you put the dough in a bowl for its 1st rise -- about an hour or so until it's doubled. If I'm pressed for time, I'll set my oven for 100 degrees and put the bowl in the oven to help it along -- but if it's a sunny day I'll just put the bowl in a sunny spot.

Once the dough is ready, you'll divide it up into 16 pieces. I like to use my handy-dandy dough scraper for this job.

Then you put the pieces into buttered pans for their second rising -- again, about an hour or until doubled in size. Then, you bake them in the oven for about a half hour.

Viola! Hot, freshly baked rolls, ready for butter. I have to say this recipe was really, really good. We ate about half of them the 1st night, and the other half were gone in a day or two. But then again I have a roll-loving husband, who said to me with a mouth full of warm roll: "yeah, you can make these again."

Cookie production line

On Saturday I went into full-scale Christmas cookie production. Most of them are now being enjoyed in sunny Florida -- the rest of them are being devoured by Ricardo's office.


I set up my dining room table with all my cooling racks, and here's the 1st batch fresh out of the oven.

In a few hours time I had the whole table filled.

I made 3 kinds of cookies: spicy molasses (my personal favorite -- they're REALLY good)...

... key lime thumbprints -- hopefully the Florida natives will appreciate these (and YES, I used real key limes)...

... and finally my famous chocolate chip cookies, back by popular demand!

French bread a la KitchenAid

On Sunday, my baking weekend continued with french bread. I used the recipe in the KitchenAid cookbook.

Here's the dough kneading in the mixer -- I love to watch the dough hook at work.

Here it is after the 1st rising -- it was really nice and smooth.

Then I formed into a loaf, to get it ready for the 2nd rising.

After the 2nd rising I made slashes in the dough, and it was ready for the oven.

And here it is cooling on the rack... it came out picture-perfect, if I do say so myself. Pass the butter!

Bolognese sauce in photos

Last weekend I decided to test out my new enameled cast iron pot with an Italian classic: bolognese sauce. I photographed each step as it simmered on the stove for over 6 hours. The recipe is from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. Basically the process is adding liquids and cooking them down, then adding more liquids.

You start with cooking chopped onions in butter and olive oil.

Add chopped carrots and celery to complete the Mirepoix.

Add a combination of ground beef, veal, and pork.

Cook until no longer pink.

Add milk.

Cook it down.

Add white wine.

Cook it down.

Add chopped tomatoes.

Cook it down.

Simmer for 3 hours.

And there you go -- 6 hours on the stove and we're finally ready to eat. I served the sauce on homemade fresh pasta (see post a few below this one).

Fun with attachments

This weekend I tried out one of my new Kitchenaid attachments, the pasta roller. It was super-easy to use, and made the pasta-making process so much enjoyable.

Here's the pasta going through the rollers for the first pass.

It keeps getting bigger...

and bigger...

until it gets to be an almost unmanagable size...

then I cut it up...

and put the noodles on the dryer.

Next stop: my plate!