Cooking from Scratch
Good sauces can be difficult. Here’s where we report our successes and failures.
Does that box of strawberries you bought leave you less than whelmed? Sure, they look great in the package, all bright and red, thanks to ethylene gas used to “ripen” them after being picked, allowing the strawberries to fool your eye, but not your sense of taste. Can those less-than-stellar strawberries be saved?
Continue reading “Roasted Balsamic Strawberries”
Several times a year, we see fresh pineapples on sale, which we buy without even knowing how we’ll use them. This time, we went with a version of Pineapple Chutney. It’s slightly different from the Roasted Chili Pineapple Chutney we made a couple of years ago, and we think this is the better of the two.
Continue reading “Pineapple Chutney”
Mornay sauce? That sounds fancy! It does sound fancy, but, really, it’s nothing other than a Bechemel sauce with cheese added; a cheese sauce, in other words. Now, we’ve done that any number of times; sometimes we mention it while we’re describing how to make a certain dish — most often macaroni and cheese of some sort — but, we’re sure that sometimes we just blast right through the recipe without pointing it out. So, why are we writing this up as a separate recipe?
Continue reading “Mornay Sauce”
As promised, here’s the light, northern Italian sauce that will pair with the beet ravioli. We posted it separately because it’s a very traditional sauce and it will pair well with any mild-flavored filled pasta, or even just linguine or fettuccine. Keep it in mind when you need a quick, easy sauce, as it only takes 5 minutes to prepare.
Continue reading “Sage and Brown Butter Sauce”
This is our standard pesto, the kind we make nearly every time we have enough basil leaves. It’s simple, but, while not quite traditional, it will beat pretty much any jar of pesto you find in the supermarket. Now, we know that we’ve done other versions in the past: Basil-Almond, Arugula, and Kale; if you’ve made one pesto, you’ll know pretty much how to make any of them. We thought we’d post this to show how quick and easy this is to put together.
Continue reading “Pesto Rustico”
We need to make up a little something for the coffee/social hour at church this coming Sunday, so we started by thinking about what would be good. We ultimately settled on crackers and dip, partly because we had just checked out Crackers and Dips: More than 50 Handmade Snacks, by Ivy Manning. One of the recipes called for harissa. Now, at the time, we were pretty sure we’d heard of harissa, but it wasn’t as if we had any in the cupboard, or had even seen harissa at the store. Did that stop us? No! With the power of the Internet, we learned a bit about harissa, and, thanks to theKitchn, had some idea how to make it, too.
We noticed the other day that we’ve posted how we make pizza, but we blithely note that you need pizza sauce, without letting you know how we make it. Mea Culpa. Let’s remedy that right now.
We actually make several types of pizza sauce, depending on the tomatoes that we have on hand, trying to coax out the very best flavors from those ‘matoes. This is the sauce we use when we have canned San Marzano tomatoes on hand.
Continue reading “Simple Pizza Sauce”
