Super Simple Tomato Sauce
This tomato sauce was a staple of my dorm life cooking. It’s incredibly simple, doesn’t require a ton of hands on work, and tastes fantastic. I made it at least once a week, and my friends are hooked. Even more, now that I’m home I still love to make it whenever I’m craving a quick pasta fix. Trust me, after just one bite nobody will know how easy it is to make!
Super Simple Tomato Sauce
INGREDIENTS
- 6 tablespoons good olive oil
- 5 cloves of fresh garlic, thinly sliced
- 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
- 28-oz can of whole or crushed tomato (pref. San Marzano’s)
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 1/2 cup Parmesan + extra for serving
- 1 lb of pasta (Spaghetti-like shapes work best… I use bucatini)
- Basil (for serving)
DIRECTIONS
Heat olive oil in a large skillet until it starts to shimmer over low-medium heat. Add the sliced garlic and crushed red pepper flakes and cook until garlic becomes either brown or translucent. Pour the can of tomatoes into the pan (be wary of splattering oil & water!!)Lower the heat to low and simmer the sauce until it thickens, approximately 20 to 30 minutes. If using whole tomatoes, crush the tomatoes when they soften with a potato masher. While the sauce is simmering, boil a pot of water and cook the pasta until it is al dente.
Once the pasta has cooked, drain it in a colander. Add the butter and Parmesan to the sauce and stir. Then add the pasta directly into the pan, and mix all together. Serve immediately, garnishing with extra Parmesan and basil leaves.
Sunny’s Sunny Side Up Breakfast Hash
My sister and I made this almost immediately after seeing it on the Food Network’s Cooking for Real, by Sunny Anderson. It combined some of our favorite ingredients (chorizo, potatoes, garlic) in one of our favorite forms of breakfast delectibleness (hash). Also, it uses a bunch of ingredients we regularly have stashed in the pantry, which made it the perfect spontaneous breakfast dish for when we had a little extra time in the morning.
Dorm Room Cooking
Cooking in a dorm room is a nearly impossible task. I’ve learned this during my last two semesters living in a dorm in New York City. While I was fortunate enough to get a suite with a kitchen, it’s really not a kitchen built for cooking. It has literally no counter space. It was probably designed for the typical consumption of canned soup and bags of ramen noodles rather than actually cooking something that didn’t come from a package.
Nonetheless, I’ve figured out how to make the most with the space I was(n’t) given. I’ve perfected the system of making pasta sauce in less than an hour, and breading and frying chicken without setting off the kitchen warden — our way-too-sensitive fire alarm that I’ve set off from the steam from boiling water. In mid-May I’ll be returning home, and hopefully have updates to provide for this website when I’m able to use a real kitchen again. In the meantime, I’ll be posting a backlog of recipes I’ve tested while on break in Los Angeles in January and March.
Photo Friday
Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park, Washington
Madelines
My sister really deserves most of the credit for this post. We were watching a movie where one of the characters made madeleines and ever since then they have been one of the things she’s really wanted to make. One day while we were out shopping for a perforated bread pan for French Bread loaves, we happened across a madeleine tray. Needless to say she bought it and the same day we were in the kitchen trying to make madeleines.
Before then, I had never had a madeleine. I’m not really a person for sweets, so they never caught my attention even though my friends would see them in coffee shops and comment on how good they were. I was missing out. Madeleines are really really good. They have my favorite ingredient – butter – and lots of it. And they are perfectly sweet.
Photo Friday
See what I did there?
How to REALLY Make French Fries
French fries might just be the perfect snack food. They are so simple, yet can be incredibly satisfying when they have the perfect combination of crunchy, salty, and potatoey goodness. However, they’ve always been a food that I’ve always shied away from making at home. Deep fried french fries would come out incredibly starchy, while baked french fries would be dry and bland.
Then I saw this post on Serious Eats. With a large amount of clever trickery and culinary experimentation, the writers at Serious Eats figured out how to imitate the venerable McDonald’s french fry at home.
McDonald’s-style french fries that I could make at home? While McDonald’s may not be a gourmet food establishment of any sort, they do have delicious french fries. As the author of the Serious Eats article says, “At their best, they are everything a french fry should be: salty, crisp, light, and not greasy.” Not only that, but I could freeze these french fries for months and have them ready to be prepared whenever I want? I had 10 pounds of potatoes on my kitchen counter within the hour.
