Lessons Learned

What I learned today

Tomato Lesson #1
Tomato sauce made with really fresh tomatoes (ones grown in someone’s garden) really is way better than anything you can buy, or even make with excellent canned tomatoes. As I mentioned, I had these tomatoes sitting around that were just giving the fruit flies something to feast on, so this morning at 8 a.m. I dug out my food mill, ran the tomatoes through it, and cooked them down.

All I can say is, WOW. The resulting sauce was sweeter than anything I’ve ever tasted (leaving out the jarred sauces that are sweetened with sugar—and now I see why, since it’s clearly to compensate for crap tomatoes), and not the least bit acid. It needed nothing—no herbs, no onion, no olive oil, not even salt. I’m sure I’ll add all those things when I use it as a pizza sauce, or a pasta sauce, but it was pretty darned good just plain.

Tomato Lesson #2
It takes a lot of tomatoes to make sauce. I had maybe a dozen of varying sizes, and I started with probably a cup of tomato puree, and it cooked down to maybe a third of a cup. I have new respect for those 28 ounce cans of tomatoes on the grocery store shelf.

Tomato Lesson #3
You can’t make sauce out of green tomatoes the way you can out of red tomatoes. As I was cranking the food mill this morning to push the red tomatoes through it, I happened to think of all the green ones that I know aren’t going to ripen between now and winter. I went over and picked an armload of them, and brought them home to push them through the food mill.

This is really, really hard. The skins aren’t the least bit soft, and I cranked on four tomatoes for probably fifteen minutes and only had about 2 tablespoons of puree in my bowl. I’m not done yet—I might try cooking them down a bit in some olive oil and then running them through the food mill and see if that works. Or I might just give up on green tomato sauce, dig out my copy of Fannie Farmer, and see if there’s a recipe for green tomato pickle.

Baking Powder Lesson
It’s super easy to make baking powder. I kind of might have guessed that, but today I made it. Now I need to find out if things made with homemade baking powder are better than those made with commercial baking powder.

Spice Lesson
None of my spices are more than fifteen years old. Most people don’t have to do any research to discover this, but I did. Anyone who does things like keep ancient bottles of Liquid Smoke needs to do the research. There’s this ad—which you may have seen—in which McCormick is trying to let you know that you may have some seriously old jars and cans of their spices hanging around. Obviously they want you to run out and replace them as soon as you realize how old they are. Anyway, the two ways they give you of identifying their older spices are that they’re labeled as being from “Baltimore, MD” and/or that they’re packaged in a tin (with the exception of black pepper). So I went through all my jars and they all say “Hunt Valley, MD” on them. I must have gotten rid of the really old ones.

Camera Lesson
I really, really want a digital SLR camera for Christmas. My little point and shoot number just isn't going to cut it. Fortunately, I already told Santa what I wanted.

Job Lesson
I think I need to get a new job. Something where taking all the fresh tomatoes I picked in my cousin’s garden and running them through a food mill, then cooking the puree down into sauce, actually counts as work. I need a job in which going through all my old jars of McCormick spices and reading the labels to see if they say “Baltimore, MD” or “Hunt Valley, MD” is an employer-sponsored activity. I need to get paid to find out if biscuits made with my homemade baking powder are any better than those made with commercial baking powder. It would help if writing about it was part of the package too. While there are jobs like that out there, I’m afraid they’re not going to bring in enough at the outset to pay for the new house, the daycare, the electric bill. So maybe that will just have to wait.

Cooking Lessons

Last night my husband made something for dinner that reminded me of one of the first meals I tried to make when I was about 12. When the smell started wafting out from the kitchen, I was reminded of the small, brown and white galley kitchen in our house in Washington, D.C. My mother had been on her sausage-and-tomatoes-with-pasta kick, and I had begged to be allowed to make it for Saturday night dinner. I was left unsupervised, and I think I can safely describe the outcome as a total disaster.

The actual recipe goes like this: Italian sausages (sweet, hot, or a combination, which is what my mother used, and at the time turkey sausage was unheard of—it was pork all the way, baby) are cooked in boiling water for about 10-12 minutes. They’re then drained, and the casings removed, and they’re sliced into approximately ¼” rounds. Penne pasta (or ziti, or any tubular shape, or yes, dammit, if you insist, bowties) is cooked in the usual way.

Chop one or two onions (depending on their size), and in a pan large enough to ultimately hold the pasta and sausage and still have room to stir, sauté the onion in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Add the sausage and let it brown up a little bit (for purely aesthetic reasons, since you’ve already cooked it in the water), then add a couple of cans of diced peeled tomatoes. Salt and pepper can be added at this point, and while ground pepper adds to the dish, the sausage is often salty enough to negate the need for additional salt. This is purely a personal choice. This should be allowed to cook down a bit, until it’s no longer soupy, but not dry either. What you’re after is something just shy of a true sauce; it should still need to be spooned, but shouldn’t actually require a ladle.

Once the desired consistency is achieved, the pasta is stirred in (because the way my mother always made this, by the time the sausage and tomatoes were ready, the pasta was cold; this step heats up the pasta, as well as ensuring that it gets well coated with the other ingredients), and then a couple of tablespoons of chopped parsley get sprinkled over everything, and it gets served. If, once the pasta is stirred in, it seems too dry, a little water or broth could be added to loosen it up, and then the parsley stirred in.

Two packages of sausage (one hot, one sweet), two medium onions, a one pound box of pasta, and two 14oz. cans of diced peeled tomatoes makes enough of this for six people with reasonable appetites, or four very hungry (or very piggy) people. Amounts can be adjusted to make more or less as desired. Although not part of my mother's original rendition of this dish, some chopped garlic could be added about the time the onions get soft and translucent. I think when I was young she skipped the garlic for my sake. Either that or she used it and I never noticed, so that when I attempted to make it, I didn't realize there was supposed to be any garlic in it.

Actually, in thinking about it, this would make kind of a nice dinner party dish. I’ve never made it for that, but it could be largely done ahead, and heated up just before serving. The parsley would have to be added at the last minute, or it would suffer, but everything else would be fine. The water-or-broth strategy would probably need to be employed, but it would be doable.

Anyway, that’s the ideal series of steps, which at almost 40 years old, I’ve now obviously mastered. At 12 I think what I had firmly in mind were the ingredients, but I was a little hazy on the execution piece of it. And I was, as I say, left unsupervised to do this.

What I did was this:

* Cook, remove casings from, and slice sausage
* Cook pasta
* Chop and sauté onion
* Stir pasta, sausage, and tomatoes into pot with sautéed onion

The result didn’t quite look like my mother’s, but i wasn’t totally sure why. Clearly I had done something wrong, but in the way of 12 year olds, I figured it was good enough, and maybe no one would notice the difference between my version and my mother’s version. I called my mother to the kitchen to have a look.

She frowned, peered more closely into the pan, and asked if I had browned the sausage, and cooked down the tomatoes. Reply in the negative. She frowned harder and tasted a spoonful (I’m not really sure why—my recollection of what the finished product looked like at that point is that it was pretty obviously a far cry from the intended, so why she felt the need to actually taste it is a little beyond my comprehension; perhaps she felt she was giving me the benefit of the doubt).

“But this isn’t even good!” she cried.

Thanks for your sensitivity, Mother.

Somehow she managed to separate out the ingredients—I think she took out the sausage, and then just rinsed off the noodles. She remade the onion and tomatoes, and stirred it all back together and we had it for dinner half an hour or so later than originally intended.

It was a long time before I was allowed to make dinner without being monitored.

I did, however, learn a valuable lesson about the layering of flavors, and increasing depth throughout the entire process. The experience also planted the seed for the lesson that some things just can’t be rushed. It took awhile for the latter to really sink in. For many years after that, my strategy when I got impatient with something that I was making was to just crank up the heat. I was teased by a college friend for doing this (my roommate and I both did it, and she mocked us both for the smoke filled kitchen that always seemed to result in any effort on our part to make something cook more quickly than was really reasonable).

Now I’ve developed much more patience as a cook. But the smell of sautéing onions and sausage still reminds me of the image of that pan of pale flabby pasta with raw canned tomatoes clinging desperately to it like survivors of a shipwreck clutching at splinters of the sunken ship, awaiting rescue from the cold dark ocean.