In the Kitchen With Mattie

Archive for July, 2010

Today there were some really bad thunder and lightening storms in our area, the whole house was shaking! When we get weather like this it usually means we will lose electrical power for part of the day so I started dinner kind of early. I made a simple tomato sauce with my favorite Pastene brand ground tomatoes and some Italian Sausage. While I like pork, for some reason I do not like it in sausage form at all, not breakfast links, not patties, not italian sweets or hots, no way no kind! Hubby on the other hand loves all kinds of sausage products, from italian, to breakfast, to knockwurst and all those others in the sausage family, if it looks like a hot dog then chances are he will love it!  I was quite content with a simple plate of penne with the sauce on it for dinner, he had his sausage and he was happy too.

                                                   Italian Sausage with Penne

2—28 ounces cans ground Pastene tomatoes

1 small onion diced finely

1 carrots grated

1 stalk celery ground finely

3 cloves garlic minced

1 cup white wine

1 tablespoon fresh chopped oregano

4 fresh basil leaves whole

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

2 tablespoons olive oil

Heat a medium size pot over medium heat, when hot add the oil and the onions, carrots and celery, oregano and salt, saute until it starts to brown, be careful it doesn’t burn, when it is browned add the crushed garlic and the red pepper flakes, saute until the garlic is fragrant, about 2-3 minutes. When garlic is fragrant add the wine and continue cooking until the wine is reduced by about half, add the tomatoes and one half can of water and stir all together well, simmer over low flame for an hour until it is thickened, add the whole basil leaves just before serving. I cook the sausages in a grill pan slowly until they render out their fat and brown some, then I remove them from the pan and slice on the diagonal and add to the sauce. If adding sausage or meatballs, add them to the sauce at the half hour mark and continue to simmer for another half hour.  If the tomatoes are a little bitter you can add a teaspoon of sugar with the tomatoes, but taste them after cooking for a few minutes as some will get sweet as they cook and it is very easy to over sweeten them by adding sugar too soon.

 

These were some of the steaks that I had cut from the rib roast we had bought on a great sale in our local market. It was a really nice piece of meat and this is the fourth dinner we have gotten from it so far, we have enough left for another dinner too. Where can you get two 16 ounce rib steak dinners for under $10? We went back and bought another one of the roasts after we had tried the first, it was really that good. I haven’t cut the second one up yet but that is coming, I should be able to get two nice sized roasts out of it and another 6 steaks.

Thanks to a lovely lady on one of the yahoo groups I belong to named MaryAnne I have started doing whole potatoes in the pressure cooker and then using them during the week for home fries, potato salad etc, so simple to already have them cooked and chilled……….so a big thank you to MaryAnne for the do ahead tip!

Tonight I seasoned two of the steaks and simply cooked them in a ribbed grill pan on top of the stove. I made the potatoes in a non stick pan with some chopped onions and a bit of bacon fat for flavor, they were seasoned with sea salt, fresh ground pepper and smoked paparika. Along with the steak and potatoes we had some steamed broccoli to complete our meal. It was on the table in 30 minutes after I started cooking and clean up was a breeze too, great for when the weather is as hot as it has been lately.

Today I made a few stuffed shells. They are very easy to do, they do take a little time though, but they freeze and re-heat wonderfully so when I do make them I always make extra to put in the freezer, they can be microwaved from frozen in just a few minutes or left to defrost in the fridge and then baked in the oven, either way on nights when you don’t feel like cooking you can still eat a home made dinner that isn’t loaded with chemical names you can’t pronounce let alone know what they are without a chemistry degree. I use Barilla jumbo shells for this recipe and it seems to me that they are making the actual shell smaller than they used to be, on the other hand there seems to be more of them in the box. I used about a half of a box today and that was 20 shells. We each had 3 for our dinner so I have 14 of them stuffed in the freezer now for those quick meals or when I haven’t remembered to take something out to defrost. This recipe is for a half box quantity, if you do the whole box then double the filling ingredients and have more sauce handy.

                                                 Stuffed Shells

1/2 box Barilla Jumbo Shells apprx 20

15-16 ounce container of fresh ricotta cheese

1 1/2 pound fresh mozzarella, half sliced and the other half grated or shredded, save the sliced for topping the shells before baking them

1 cup fresh grated reggiano parmesan cheese

1/2 box frozen chopped spinach, defrosted and squeezed dry, you can also use fresh, chopped finely

1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper

4 cups of your favorite tomato sauce

Bring a 4 quart pot of water to a rapid boil and add the shells along with a tablespoon of salt. Cook about 7 minutes, until a firm al dente stage. Drain and rinse the shells in cold water to chill them and stop the cooking process, set aside to drain.

In a large bowl mix the ricotta, the grated mozzarella, the parmesan, the spinach, salt and pepper, make sure it is well mixed and the spinach is well distributed thoughout.

Put  two small ladels of the sauce in the bottom of a shallow oven safe casserole. Take a shell and fill it with approximately 1 heaping tablespoon of the filling, place in the casserole with the cheese facing upwards. Continue filling until you have used all the filling and shells. Cover the shells with a few ladels of the sauce and then cover them with the sliced mozzarella. Bake the dish at 350 until it is hot and bubbling and the top is lightly browned, let sit 15 minutes to settle before serving so the cheese firms up a little and doesn’t all run out when the shells are served.

These can be frozen either baked or unbaked, you can  lay them out not touching each other after they are stuffed on a sheet pan and place them in the freezer until they are frozen solid, then place them into a double zip lock bag, take out whatever amount you need for a dinner when you need them, add the sauce and top with sliced mozzarella and bake as before.

 

I don’t know where everyone that reads this blog lives. What I do know is that it is HOT here in the southern United States! When it gets this hot I know that the last thing I am thinking of is roasting something in the oven for dinner, I am thinking more of how nice it would be to be able to just go sit in a refreshing swimming pool. I could cook out on the grill but sometimes I don’t want to have to even go out and babysit the grill in this heat.  Thank heavens for my old (around 15 years now) Kenmore combination microwave convection oven, it does a wonderful job and doesn’t heat up the whole kitchen. An hour on the convection mode and we had a nice small pork roast and gravy for dinner, along with some fresh carrots and some couscous it was a nice meal.

This is the couscous I use……….

 

I take a small onion and dice it fine, put 2 tablespoons of butter in a 3 quart saucepan over a medium-low flame and melt the butter, then I add one tablespoon of olive oil, then the diced onions.  Saute the onion until it is translucent, add a few grinds of pepper and then the couscous, stir to coat the couscous with the butter and then add 2 cups of home made unsalted chicken stock, let simmer for 10 minutes over a low flame and then chec for doneness, most of the liquid should be absorbed by this time and the couscous tender. Serve with gravy or chill and make a nice side salad out of it. I like it chilled and then mixed with some diced tomato, cucumber, celery, shredded carrots and poached chicken and a bit of dressing, makes a nice light lunch or dinner when it is too hot to cook.

The pork roast tonight was rubbed with some salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder and thyme. It was then cooked for an hour in my little convection oven. This was a small roast (1 1/2 pound) and it would have been done sooner than one hour but when I started it it was actually still frozen in the center. Starting it from a semi frozen state seems to help keep moisture in the interior of my roasts, I noticed that too when I pressure cook some others from a frozen state too. All in all it was a nice meal and I didn’t break a sweat doing it.

So I have a question for you readers. What do you all do when you have a bunch of leftover burgers on hand. I hate to admit it but ours usually go into the fridge and then to the trash after sitting for over a week and being overlooked. If they get lucky and I happen to remember them in the frudge then sometimes before they go bad I will chop them up and give them to our dogs as a treat, but more times they go to the trash.

I had a bunch of already cooked burgers here tonight and was determined to actually use them rather than trash them. We used to have pizzaburgers pretty often when we lived back east years ago but I haven’t made them for us in a L-O-N-G  time. Tonight when I found some leftover sauce and some fresh mozzarella in the fridge that needed to be used I decided to make all these things into our old favorite PizzaBurgers.

The next problem was how to re-heat and already cooked burger without drying it out. Microwaving it surely would dry it, same with heating it in a pan on the stove. Enter the rice cooker and its steamer insert. I put 3 burgers in the top of the steamer and a cup of water in the bottom, covered the cooker and hit the button. Rather than wait for the timer to go off I check the heating progress after about 5 minutes, they were still a little cool in the center so I let them go another 5 minutes and they were perfectly hot, they were also still not dried out in the center.

I put a small pan that would hold all three burgers in it on the stove and poured some of the tomato sauce into it, when it started simmering I put the three burgers in the pan too. I spooned some of the sauce over the burgers and then put some mozzarella on top, covered the pan and turned the flame very low and let them cook for a few minutes until the cheese was nice and melted. Hubby was happy when he saw what I had made for dinner and he didn’t realize that he was eating leftover burgers until I told him when he was finished dinner, he agreed that the burgers were not in the least dried out and the pizza burgers brought back lots of great memories too. I think the dogs will be upset when they don’t get the leftover burgers anymore. I also think that steaming is definitely the way to re-heat them even tho it is an extra step instead of trying to heat them on top of the stove in a pan.