Homemade lasagna

Tonight's Menu

• beefy lasagna w/homemade noodles
  
• green salad "bar"
  

Is there anything more comforting than a big ol' pan of lasagna? I think not, people. This one featured homemade noodles and sauce, and I'm not going to lie and say it was fast and easy. But it did seem a whole lot less fiddly and meticulous than the ravioli experiment, which made it FEEL easy. Ish.

Okay, for the noodles I made my usual pasta dough and just rolled it into sheets and let them dry on the counter for a couple of hours. That part WAS easy, now that I've gotten the hang of my cheap-ass pasta machine.

For the sauce, I chopped up an onion and minced several cloves of garlic and cooked them in a big pot in a little EVOO until they were soft. I kept them on a low-ish heat because I didn't want them to brown or anything, just soften. Then I dumped in a large can of tomato paste (the ones that are about the size of a soup can) and stirred that around a bit until it started to smell kind of toasted. I thinned it out with a bit of red wine (pinot noir -- it's what I had), then dumped in a huge can of crushed tomatoes. (It would have been helpful if I'd noted the ounces on these cans before I chucked them, huh? This one was about a quart, maybe? I dunno.) I was worried the sauce was still too thick, so I thinned it out some more with water, then stirred in a couple of tablespoons of sugar, some dried oregano, basil, salt and pepper and let it simmer uncovered for maybe 30-45 minutes.

For the meat, I browned some ground bison (feel free to use beef, turkey, whatever floats your boat) over medium heat in a skillet, then turned the heat down to low and stirred in a couple spoonfuls of sauce to moisten it. Then, just for the heck of it, I stirred in whatever was left of the ravioli filling from the other night (would you believe I STILL had some left, even after stuffing mushrooms with it?).

Then I just layered the noodles, meat, some fresh mozzarella (you could use ricotta, but DH doesn't like it) and the sauce in a 9 x 13-inch pan and baked it uncovered for about 40 minutes at 375 degrees F. It was super tasty and definitely worth the time it took to make it.

The salad bar was the same as last night.

Remind me from now on to BUY my cheese ravioli, but make my lasagna from scratch whenever possible, okay?

Even MORE adventures in homemade pasta

Tonight's Menu

• homemade cheese ravioli
  
• green salad "bar"
  

I will be honest with you: I don't know that I'll be making homemade ravioli all that often in the future. It's not that it was difficult at all, but OMG, it was SO TIME-CONSUMING. I'm not sure the results were worth all the time that went into this dish. I mean, the ravioli was really good, but I don't know that it was two hours worth of good, you know?

ANYWAY, what I did was mix up a batch of pasta dough (two cups flour, one teaspoon salt, three eggs, whizz it all up in a food processor then wrap it in plastic and stick it in the fridge) and roll it out into sheets. That part was easy.

For the filling, I combined some whole-milk ricotta (if yours is runny or weepy, drain it first) with some shredded parmesan (NOT the stuff in the green can), chopped fresh parsley, salt and pepper. Also easy.

Then, I think I may have done something stupid. I'm pretty sure most people who are crazy enough to make ravioli at home dollop the filling onto the pasta sheets and then lay another sheet on top, sealing everything around the dollops of filling and then cutting the raviolis apart. But I'm such a doof, I wasn't sure I'd be able to get everything spaced out right. So I cut my pasta sheets into squares and made my raviolis one at a time and OH MY GOD, never again. It just took FOREVER, and they were kind of jacked-up looking. Maybe I just need practice.

But whatever, I boiled them in salted water for about five minutes and served them with my usual tomato sauce and they were fine. Really good, even! But holy cats, y'all. My back is killing me from all that ravioli assembly.

The salad bar was just romaine lettuce, sliced cucumbers, and sliced carrots from the garden.

More adventures in pasta

Tonight's Menu

• homemade spaghetti w/quick meatless tomato sauce
  
• green salad "bar"
  

I am determined to get this homemade pasta thing right, y'all. After posting about my most recent attempt at it on my other blog, some kind readers offered tips and I incorporated those this time around with very satisfactory results!

I used the same recipe as last time (two cups flour, one teaspoon salt, three eggs -- is it weird that I have that memorized now?) but after rolling the dough through on a couple of different settings, I folded it in thirds and went back to a larger setting and rolled it through again before repeating the process a couple of times. This time I was able to get it to a #6 thickness before chickening out. My crappy pasta maker has a built-in cutter for spaghetti so I tried it and it worked! I tossed the strands with a bit of flour, then hung them on a kitchen towel over the back of a chair to dry for a couple of hours. They cooked up in about three minutes and were really, really good! Yay! Success!

The tomato sauce was my usual. And actually, it was left over from some purchased tortellini I made several days ago. It keeps well in the fridge.

Tonight's salad bar was chopped romaine and green leaf lettuces, sliced green onions, sliced carrots from the garden, and some tiny cherry tomatoes (I caved and bought some at the store, which I would not normally do this time of year, but I NEEDED tomatoes, y'all).

I am SO excited about this whole pasta thing, can you tell? If I ever get brave enough for homemade tortellini or ravioli, you all will be the first to know.

And now for something COMPLETELY different

Tonight's Menu

• grilled mild Italian sausages
  
• homemade egg noodles
  
• buttery green cabbage
  

Dudes! I made homemade pasta for the first time ever! I am a little excited about it, so we're going to have to discuss it first, if you don't mind. I've been wanting a manual pasta machine for AGES and I finally got one last week. It's a really cheap-ass model, which may have been a mistake, but oh well. Homemade pasta! It's all good!

I used a recipe from Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything. It was super easy: just combine two cups of all-purpose flour (I used unbleached), one teaspoon of salt (I used fine sea salt) and three eggs in a food processor until it forms a ball. Knead until smooth, then wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least one hour. Then divide the dough into 4-6 pieces and work these pieces through your pasta machine one at a time until they're as thin as you want them. Cut into shapes, dry, then boil in salted water for 3-5 minutes. Easy, right?

WRONG, if you have a crappy pasta machine, which I apparently do. The first batch was a disaster -- it stuck to the rollers and made a godawful mess. Eventually I got the hang of it but it required adding a LOT of flour to the dough and I was worried that the end result would be super tough noodles. I pressed on, though -- making about five pasta sheets, cutting them into 5- to 6-inch lengths and then cutting those into 1/4-inch strips. I was going for a basic egg noodle kind of thing. I shook off all the excess flour I could and then spread them on my kitchen counter to dry for about an hour before cooking.

They actually came out really good! They were super tasty and the kids both had seconds. Next time I'll roll them a little thinner -- I was so aggravated by the sticky roller issue that I only did them to number 4 on the dial, and they thickened a bit while cooking, so the end result was vaguely dumpling-like. But still very tasty! Not bad for a first effort, I think. I'm excited about experimenting with this!

I cooked the sausages inside because it was WICKED windy/chilly outside today. First I simmered them in water for 15 minutes, as usual, then I browned them off on my beloved IKEA grill pan. You can just brown them in a skillet if you don't have a grill pan, or broil them in the oven until the skins are nice and crispy.

For the cabbage, I chopped half a head of green cabbage and sauteed it in a skillet with three tablespoons of butter. I had the heat up fairly high because I wanted the cabbage to caramelize and pick up some color. When it was just the way I wanted it, I seasoned it with salt and pepper, turned off the heat, and kept it covered until serving time. It was tender, buttery and delicious! I loves me some cabbage, y'all.

Pasta & 'shrooms

Tonight's Menu

• spaghetti w/mushroom-herb sauce
  
• green salad "bar"
  

I am in such a rut with pasta that I usually don't even bother to tell you when I make it. I tend to do one of three things with it: spaghetti with my quickie tomato sauce, some sort of pasta shapes (penne, usually) with Knorr Parma Rosa sauce (a packet of powder to which you add milk and butter), or any sort of pasta with just butter and shredded cheese mixed in.

I know, right? BORING.

So tonight I decided to experiment. I know what you're thinking -- that NEVER ends well, at least for me -- but this time it came out pretty darn tasty! As usual I didn't measure anything, but here's essentially what I did.

First I sliced some crimini mushrooms (these are sometimes called baby bellas) and minced some fresh garlic. I melted some butter over medium heat in a skillet, tossing in the mushrooms and garlic and letting them sweat out fairly slowly without picking up any color. Then I added some fresh thyme, some minced fresh rosemary, salt and pepper and just tossed it around a bit (this smelled AMAZING) before adding in some heavy cream (left over from the pork and gnocchi the other night). I let that simmer over low heat until the cream had thickened just a bit. Then I drained the spaghetti (which had been cooking all this time) and dumped it right into the skillet with the mushroom sauce. Toss, throw on some chopped fresh parsley, and serve! This was really pretty darn tasty and a nice change from our usual boring pasta dinners!

The salad was still boring, though -- just green leaf lettuce and sliced carrots from the garden. We ate up the last of the CSA greenhouse tomatoes last night when I made hamburgers so this salad was even more bare than usual!

No more grilling

Tonight's Menu

• roasted chicken thighs
  
• buttered egg noodles
• steamed broccoli
  

I hate the end of daylight saving time, y'all. HATE IT. Because that means it gets dark right around the time I'm starting to cook dinner, and I am not a big fan of grilling in the dark. Sure, we have floodlights out back and whatnot, but it's the PRINCIPLE of the thing. Grilling in the dark just feels WRONG. So while I far prefer my chicken grilled, this time of year roasting is where it's at.

So, all I did with these thighs (bone in, skin on, ten of 'em) was whomp them into a pan, sprinkle them with salt, pepper, snipped fresh rosemary and fresh thyme, then pop them in the oven at 450 degrees F for about 45 minutes to an hour. They came out crispy, juicy and delicious even though they weren't grilled.

Buttered egg noodles are pretty self explanatory, right? Just boil some noodles? And then drain them? And butter them? Yeah. Easy.

The broccoli was steamed in the microwave.

Super easy dinner, but DAMN I am going to miss grilling these next few months! Hello, it's still in the 70s and 80s here!

Pumpkin seed pesto

Tonight's Menu

• penne with pumpkin seed pesto
  
• green salad "bar"

I have a complicated relationship with basil, y'all. I love the way it tastes and I love having a supply of fresh basil in-season, but I have a horrible time growing it. I don't know what it is, but sweet basil HATES me. Whenever I plant it, either something eats it all or it dies within a week.

However, my parents bought me a plant this summer that was called Pesto Basil and I've had a great deal of success with that one, finally! It has smaller leaves than sweet basil and they're sort of variegated light green and white. I planted it in my garden instead of in a pot and it's done really well. With summer drawing to a close I've been worried about losing it all and decided that the thing to do was make pesto with it. However, as you know, the girl is allergic to tree nuts so pine nuts are out. I googled for nut-free pesto recipes and found several that featured various types of seeds instead of nuts -- why didn't I think of that?! We know she isn't allergic to pumpkin seeds (we always roast them after carving jack o' lanterns and she pretty much eats her weight in them) so I bought some raw ones in bulk and set to work.

I wasn't really measuring but here's approximately how I made it:

2 cups basil leaves
2 garlic cloves
1/4 cup raw pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
1/4 cup shredded parmesan cheese (NOT the stuff in the green can)
extra-virgin olive oil

Dump the first four ingredients into the food processor and whiz them until blended. Then, with the processor running, drizzle in the EVOO until the pesto is to the consistency you like. Store in an airtight container in the fridge. (I've heard it helps to cover the pesto with a layer of olive oil before storing it, so that's what I did.)

I served it with penne pasta (dried, prepared according to package directions) and it was really good! The pumpkin seeds give it a slightly different flavor from pine nuts, but the texture is the same. I used CSA garlic to make it and it was REALLY strong so I'm going to have garlic breath for a week, but it was worth it!

Tonight's salad "bar" was torn green leaf lettuce, shredded carrots, and wedged tomatoes.

Pasta!

Tonight's Menu

• farfalle with roasted tomatoes
  
• peasant bread
  
• green salad "bar"
  

We eat pasta at least once a week around here but I don't usually post about it because, well, it's boring. But tonight's pasta was anything but!

It was CSA pickup day again and we got loads of tomatoes. Up to now some of the tomatoes in the CSA boxes have been not quite ripe, which allowed us to put them on the windowsills and then forget about them for a few days while they ripened up. However, all of today's tomatoes were perfectly ripe, which means I need to use them FAST since I'm not into canning or preserving or any of that stuff (might have to GET into it though, if this keeps up).

Sooo, all I did was follow this recipe for roasting them with garlic, basil and balsamic vinegar, then I served the resulting delicious melange over farfalle (aka bow-tie pasta). It was SO yummy, y'all. This time I refrained from tarting it up with any eggplant or zucchini (though we got bunches of both in today's box).

The bread was from the book. I SWEAR I will post a review of this soon. A few people have emailed me with questions and I will try to get those answers out this week, I promise!

The salad was the exact same one we've been eating for the past week, but with fresh ingredients. I'm getting a little bored with salad, frankly, but the kids are always happy to eat it so it's a painless way to get veggies into them. Sigh.

Soft things

Tonight's Menu

• sauteed tilapia fillets
  
• buttered egg noodles
  
• steamed broccoli
  

The boy child had four primary molars pulled Wednesday in anticipation of braces, and he's been eating nothing but pudding, applesauce, Jello and the occasional bowl of overcooked pasta ever since, poor kid! I wanted to cook a dinner he could actually EAT that contained a bit of protein and veggie. This worked out great and he was happy to get some real food in his tummy. Who knew a 12 year old could get tired of pudding and ice cream?!

This was also a super easy dinner to make. I just seasoned some tilapia fillets with salt and pepper and sauteed them in a skillet with EVOO -- done! The egg noodles were from a package, just boiled until done and then drained and tossed with some butter. Broccoli was steamed in the microwave. I cooked everything a little longer than usual to yield a softer texture for the boy, but nothing was mushy. Hooray for easy, nutritious, AND soft on the gums!

Sausages on the grill

Tonight's Menu

• grilled sausages & onions
  
• "pizza" pasta salad
• green salad "bar"
  

Gorgeous weather today. I grilled. Big surprise, eh?

I had some nice, fresh (non-cured/dried) sweet Italian sausages which I simmered in a big pot of water for about 15-20 minutes, then slapped on the grill to crisp and brown the skins. SO easy. Then I just cut a sweet onion (Texas 1015, in this case) into wedges, tossed them with a bit of EVOO, and grilled them on a grill screen for a few minutes until they'd softened and picked up a bit of color. I don't know why, but I HAVE to have onions with my sausage. I just do. It's some kind of law.

The pasta salad was something different for us, because I just never make it. In our family, pasta and salad are pretty much two completely different dishes, you know? But I got a wild hair and decided to make something with Italian-ish flavors that the kids might like. It was really easy to do, too!

All I did was cook and drain some pasta (wagon wheels -- it's what I had), then rinse it in cold water to chill it down. That went into a bowl along with cubes of mozzarella (not FRESH mozzarella -- the kind you can shred for pizza), slices of pepperoni, some sun-dried tomatoes (not the kind in oil, though you could use those if you wanted), and a bunch of shredded parmesan cheese (NOT the powdery stuff in the green can). I poured a little bottled Italian dressing on top, tossed it all together, and stuck it in the fridge until dinner was ready. It was really tasty! From a visual standpoint, it really needed something green, though. If I made this again I might add a little flat-leaf parsley, fresh basil, or a chopped green pepper.

Green salad bar was the same as on Tuesday.

Yummy delicious CARBS

Tonight's Menu

• spaghetti marinara
  
• leftover green salad with lettuce FROM THE GARDEN!
  

DH has been shunning carbs (except potatoes, for which he has a weakness) for quite a while now, and when I told the kids that he was working late tonight and therefore we'd be having spaghetti, you would have thought I'd told them we were having ice cream for dinner. They were SO EXCITED. I think the boy ate a couple of pounds of spaghetti all on his own.

I've been told that my marinara sauce is not TECHNICALLY an actual marinara, but the degree to which I DO NOT CARE cannot be adequately expressed. It's a vegetarian tomato sauce, a'ight? I don't know from marinara.

Here's how I make it: take a can of Del Monte diced tomatoes with onion and garlic and combine it with a small can of tomato paste. If you don't like a chunky sauce, you can do this in a blender. Otherwise just stir them together in a saucepan. Stir in a little water; the sauce will thin just a bit during the cooking process so use your judgment here. Stir in 4-6 Tbs. of sugar, depending on how sweet you like your sauce. Add some dried oregano and basil; again, however much you want. Bring it to a boil, then cover and reduce the heat. Simmer for as long as it takes the pasta to cook.

There's a story behind this recipe but I've had a couple of sidecars (they go GREAT with Italian food, by the way) and can't be arsed to tell it right now.

Pasta

Tonight's Menu

• spaghetti marinara
  
• crusty whole-grain bread
  
• fresh green salad
  

My local grocery store has started replacing a lot of name-brand stuff with their own generic version, and this pisses me off like you would not believe. Sure, I buy the store brand occasionally and SOME of it is identical to the name brand stuff, but not all, and I hate having my choices taken away like that.

However, they also offer some of their own stuff that has no equal in name brands, as far as I know. Like they have this line of frozen "artisan" breads that is really, really good. I buy the big whole-grain one, which is very rustic and crusty and full of seeds and bits of stuff, and I LOVE it. You just thaw it for 15 minutes, then bake it for another 15 and it's delicious. Instead of spreading it with butter or margarine, we've been dipping it in EVOO with a little parmesan and freshly ground pepper.

Yum!

Lasagne for everyone!

Tonight's Menu

• cheesy lasagne
  
• crusty garlic bread
  
• big-ass salad
  

I could swear that years ago, DH told me he didn't like ricotta cheese. So all these years I've been making my lasagne with mozzarella only. Sometimes I'd throw in some spinach and/or mushrooms, but ever since the boy child decided he liked PLAIN lasagne, I haven't even been doing that. So it's been sauce, noodles and mozzarella. No meat, no veg, no nothing. Yeah. Kind of flat and yucky, actually.

HOWEVER, DH has suddenly decided that he would be okay with trying some ricotta after all. So today I mixed ricotta (part skim) with the mozzarella and layered THAT with the noodles and sauce, and my lasagne was much closer to something resembling normal. DH declared that he liked the ricotta version better, so thank God.

Oh, and by the way? Those oven-ready lasagne noodles are the best invention since microwave popcorn.

Day 60

Adult Menu

• lasagna
  
• whole wheat dinner rolls
  
• salad
  

Girl Child
Ate some salad, two rolls, and some shredded cheddar.

Boy Child
Ate everything!

No one in the family (except me) likes ricotta, so I make my lasagna with just noodles, sauce, and lots of mozzarella. Sometimes I put mushrooms and/or spinach on the "adult" side, but the boy won't eat it that way.

Day 14

Adult Menu

• four-cheese ravioli with marinara sauce
  
• a big green salad w/cucumbers and carrots
  

Girl Child
Doesn't like cheese ravioli all of a sudden (even though she loves cheese tortellini, which is the EXACT SAME THING but a different shape) so she had a peanut butter sandwich. She also had some salad and some shredded parmesan cheese.

Boy Child
LOVES cheese ravioli and had three helpings (no marinara) plus some salad.

I keep frozen cheese ravioli and/or tortellini on hand for days when I don't feel much like cooking. This was one of those days. I could whip up the marinara in my sleep, I've been making it so long, and the salad was super easy to toss together (I buy a pre-bagged mixture of greens and toss in baby carrots from yet ANOTHER bag, so all I have to do is cut up the cucumber).